De samme menneskene som påstår at verden er totalt forandret etter 11.9.01
dyrker det kapitalistisk-totalitære ideologiske vrøvl som presenteres av
"filosofen" Fukuyama i den siste av nedenstående artikler, og som går ut på
at intet er endret siden 1989, historien er slutt og kapitalismen og noe han
kaller "demokratiet" har vunnet for alltid. Verdensrekord i logisk
selvmotsigelse. Spørsmålet om hva vi egentlig skal med demokrati, hvis
sannheten om det lykkelige samfunn er funnet for alltid av ham og de andre
markedsfrelste, dukker selvsagt aldri opp for en komplett autist og
"moderne" prøysser som Fukuyama.
Også på det militære område viser seg nå denne besynderlige inerti som
idiotiet har fått i vår tid - apparatenes egenlogikk overtar mer og mer.
Pentagon og propagandapressa er i gang med å utkjempe "Golf-krigen II",
pussig nok under ledelse av Bush II. Den samme idiotiske og komplett
utsiktsløse "debatt" om "ground troops" som vi opplevde under Kosovo-krigen
utfolder seg nå som komedie etter tragedien i 1999 og bekrefter Marx' utsagn
om historiens gjentakelser.
Det byråkratiske og uendelig havesyke umennesket - en mental kjempebaby - er
blitt Vestens skjebne. Det kapitalistiske systemet har overvunnet
demokratiet og kveler alt i sin sinnssyke logikk, mens barbariet velter fram
inspirert av dette. Vi nærmer oss sluttscenene i Faust og Peer Gynt.
Karsten Johansen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,574216,00.html
Pentagon split over war plan
Generals at odds with politicians on strategy
Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor Monday October 15,
2001 The Guardian
The Bush administration is growing increasingly alarmed by the direction of
the military campaign in Afghanistan after a week of almost continuous
bombing has failed to dislodge either Osama bin Laden or the Taliban
leadership.
In the absence of new intelligence on the whereabouts of the Saudi-born
extremist accused of masterminding the September 11 terrorist attacks, US
generals are under pressure from civilian defence officials to send greater
numbers of special forces into Afghanistan to try to accomplish what the
bombing failed to do - flush out a target.
But the Pentagon's top brass are reluctant to deploy their best troops in
the absence of good intelligence about Bin Laden's whereabouts, and before
further bombing has softened expected resistance on the ground.
The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is reported to be increasingly
frustrated by the caution of the generals and their inability to come up
with a creative battle plan. One of his aides was quoted in today's edition
of Newsweek as comparing the attitude of today's Pentagon to the
conventional thinking familiar in the Gulf war - a thinking now considered
to be out of date and inappropriate for the delicate nature of the war
against terrorism. "The media are preparing to cover a second Gulf war," the
aide said, "and the military are preparing to fight one."
It was always assumed that the second phase of the military campaign in
Afghanistan would involve the deployment of significant numbers of special
forces, but as the moment drew closer yesterday differences were becoming
more visible over how many should be used and in what manner. Mr Rumsfeld
had taken office planning a radical shake-up of the military hierarchy, but
did not have time to do so before the US came under attack on September 11.
After the suicide attacks on New York and Washington were traced to Bin
Laden and his camps in Afghanistan, Mr Rumsfeld gave his top generals the
task of drawing up a radical and innovative battle plan.
His aides predicted that apart from a few opening air strikes to destroy the
Taliban's air defences, the war would be a largely covert conflict. Instead
the first week of the campaign has involved wave after wave of Gulf
war-style strikes, and a rising toll of claimed civilian casualties.
The traditionalist generals believe that there are more military targets in
Afghanistan which can be hit from the air, and have backed the renewed use
of heavy bombers this week, after a weekend in which most strikes were
carried out by smaller, tactical strikers launched from carriers in the
Arabian sea.
One potential target is the Taliban's 55th Brigade, made up principally of
Arab fighters who are thought to constitute the regime's Praetorian guard.
The first week of bombing has not "smoked out" Bin Laden or the Taliban
leadership from their strongholds, as President Bush had hoped, and the
Pentagon's military planners are said to be still operating in an
intelligence vacuum. Some feel the job of finding these elusive targets
belongs to the diplomats and the spies. "I hope the military isn't given
this to solve," General Anthony Zinni, the former head of the Pentagon's
central command, is reported to have grumbled to other officers.
British defence officials were yesterday giving the clear impression that
military planners are deeply frustrated by the lack of intelligence about
the impact of the air campaign and what next they should do to attack such
elusive targets.
They say they are continuing to look at all the options for the deployment
of ground troops, including "small units" - a reference to special forces -
or "larger numbers" - the prospect of airborne troops gaining a bridgehead
inside Afghanistan as a base for raids against Taliban forces.
But sources describe the plans as "paper talk" and say no decision has been
made.
Top officers in the Pentagon are leaning away from setting up a base inside
Afghanistan on the grounds that it would be vulnerable. Instead the most
likely option is that helicopter-borne special forces units will launch
their missions from the deck of the Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in the
Arabian sea.
Military planners are concerned about the approaching winter and the
pressures on the Pakistani leader, General Pervez Musharraf, as well as the
immediate tactical problem of knowing where to strike against the forces of
an unconventional enemy.
While most of the Taliban's air defences have been destroyed, their light
forces and the small open-backed lorries they use to move about the country
were reported yesterday to be mostly intact.
The Afghan militia's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, yesterday
offered to hand Bin Laden over to a neutral country if the US provided
evidence of his guilt. But the offer, a reiteration of previous Taliban
proposals, was immediately rejected by President Bush.
A White House spokeswoman said: "The president has been very clear: there
will be no negotiations."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,574204,00.html
Stench of death in a flattened village
Zeeshan Haider in Khorum, Afghanistan Monday October 15, 2001 The Guardian
An old man deferentially removed his turban as he spoke. "We are poor
people, don't hit us," he said. "We have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden.
We are innocent people."
"I lost my four daughters, my son and my wife in this attack," said Toray, a
distraught farmer, who was out of his house when the bombs struck.
To underline his point, he held up a piece of shrapnel with the words "fin
guided bomb" stencilled on it - virtually all he recovered from the debris
of his flattened home.
There are not many witnesses to say what happened to Khorum village in
eastern Afghanistan last Wednesday night; there are not many survivors. One
thing is clear. The simple collection of mud huts and livestock pens in this
village, around 38 miles from the east Afghanistan town of Jalalabad, was
hit by a devastating firestorm.
Villagers said 20 to 25 bombs or missiles rained on the area in two waves of
attacks.
Taliban officials say Khorum was flattened in an air raid by US warplanes
and as many as 200 people may have been killed. Officials say 160 bodies
have already been pulled from the rubble, and villagers from neighbouring
hamlets were scrambling around yesterday looking for more.
The stench of death enveloped the village. In the rubble of one house, the
remains of an arm stuck out from beneath a pile of bricks. A leg had been
uncovered nearby. There was also a bloodstained pillow.
The carcasses of livestock - by which many Afghan farmers measure their
family's wealth - lay bloated in the surrounding fields, attracting swarms
of flies.
When our group of reporters - the first foreign nationals to be allowed into
Afghanistan since all foreigners were ordered to leave just days after the
September 11 suicide plane attacks - arrived in Khorum we saw villagers
still sifting through the rubble of houses pulverised by the attack from the
sky.
We were besieged by more than 100 students from a nearby Islamic school,
chanting "Down with America," "Long live Islam" and "We are ready for jihad
(holy war)".
It was not easy to tell if the protest was spontaneous or or chestrated, but
it was clear that their feelings were genuine.
"We have brought you here to see the cruelty of the Americans," Maulvi
Atiqullah, director of the Jalalabad information department, said before our
Taliban-organised trip to Khorum began.
However, some questions remained unanswered last night. Reporters saw only a
dozen or so freshly dug graves that officials said included the bodies of
children killed in the raid.
What happened to the other bodies which officials say they have recovered is
unclear, but Muslims generally observe Koranic requirements that the dead
are buried before the next sunset.
Many training bases operated by Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network were known to
have previously been situated around Jalalabad, although residents of Khorum
insisted there were none there now.
"I ask America not to kill us," said Hussain Khan, who said he lost four
children in the raid and survived only by racing out of the house when he
first heard a plane overhead.
Pentagon officials have said at least one of its bombs had missed its target
since air raids in pursuit of Osama bin Laden began last week. But that was
near Kabul. Washington has so far declined to comment on reports from Khorum.
· Zeeshan Haider is a Reuters correspondent. His party of journalists was
accompanied by the Taliban to Khorum
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,574207,00.html
Week of bombing leaves US further from peace, but no nearer to victory
Top officer still cautious on use of ground troops
Julian Borger in Washington and Luke Harding in Islamabad Monday October 15,
2001 The Guardian
At one end of the US war machine are people like Donald Rumsfeld, the
ultimate defence intellectual who views the war on terrorism as an
intriguing puzzle requiring new ways of thinking. At the other are the
long-serving men in uniform such as General Tommy Franks, the former
artillery officer leading the campaign.
Gen Franks is the commander-in-chief of the central command, whose
headquarters are in Tampa Florida, from where he is orchestrating the air
strikes on Afghanistan. He is a blunt, outspoken veteran of the Vietnam and
Gulf wars and, by all accounts, he has taken to heart the lessons of both:
be very sure of what you are doing before you put soldiers on the ground,
and rely as much as possible on the awesome destructive capability of US air
power.
The two men embody the different approaches circulating in the corridors of
the Pentagon over how to pursue the war on terrorism. Winter is coming to
the Afghan highlands and decisions have to be made quickly, but a week's
bombing under Gen Franks's command has so far failed to push Osama bin Laden
or the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, into the open where they could
be picked out by an air strike, or grabbed by special forces.
That would have been considered a bonus in the initial phase of the
campaign, but in the absence of such a stroke of luck, differences over how
the plan should proceed have come to the surface.
Mr Rumsfeld and his civilian advisers believe the US military does not have
the flexibility to combat an enemy like Bin Laden. They point to a
computerised war game in 1997 in which the army took on a terrorist
organisation similar to al-Qaida, and lost. The generals, the analysts
concluded, spent too much time looking for things to bomb, and not enough
time looking for innovative methods of eliminating the enemy.
Mr Rumsfeld is reported to be so frustrated with the pursuit of the war by
Gen Franks's command, with its emphasis on waves of Gulf-style bombing
sorties, that he is pressing to have operational control shifted from Tampa
to Washington. Mr Rumsfeld and his circle want to pursue a new military
doctrine built around small groups of special forces soldiers who will dart
in and out of Afghanistan looking for intelligence and targets.
Minimal resistance
Uniformed top brass are more comfortable with the technique of the Powell
doctrine - named after secretary of state, Colin Powell - which dictates the
overwhelming use of air power until the deployment of ground troops is
either unnecessary or met with minimal resistance.
This week US and British special forces units are expected to be deployed in
Afghanistan, but they are being sent on highly dangerous fishing
expeditions, concealing themselves along the sides of dirt roads and
mountain paths on the chance that Bin Laden or Mullah Omar, or their top
lieutenants, might pass by.
Senior Pentagon officers have pointed out the dangers in such missions. The
terrain is littered with millions of landmines, and "butterfly"
anti-personnel mines, dropped by Soviet helicopter pilots over hostile
territory in the 80s.
Before sending in larger numbers of troops, the traditionalist generals want
to continue the air campaign. It has been kept up for seven days, with only
a pause on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer.
But such niceties are not helping the state department efforts to keep the
international coalition together.
At the weekend the Pentagon admitted that an F-18 navy strike aircraft had
accidentally dropped a 900kg (2,000lb) bomb on a suburb of Kabul, killing
four civilians and wounding eight. Latitude and longitude were mixed up when
the coordinates were entered into its guidance system.
The Taliban are claiming that civilian victims have been more numerous. In
any case the distinction between combatants and non-combatants is blurred.
Many of the "troop concentrations" targeted are conscripts who may have been
market vendors only a few days earlier and who were rounded up by Taliban
press gangs.
These troops have been hit by cluster bombs and on one occasion by a huge
bunker-buster bomb which would have burrowed into the ground beneath them
and then swallowed them as the explosion opened up a gaping crater.
As reports of the casualties percolate into the Middle East and Pakistan,
support for the US is fast eroding. A poll of Pakistanis found that 83%
supported the Taliban in its confrontation with the US. According to
Newsweek, which conducted the poll, support for the Afghan militia jumped by
40% when the bombing began last week.
The Taliban are beginning to exploit the TV images of US mistakes by
inviting reporters to view the damage. This "collateral damage" is
inevitable in a bombing campaign. The only way to avoid it is to put troops
on the ground, but that is fraught with human, military and political
problems. The US population remains virtually unanimous in support of the
campaign, but that may change with the return of body bags.
The Pentagon's military leaders have painful memories of the last two
comparable special forces missions, which both ended in fiascos - the 1980
"Desert One" operation to rescue US hostages in Iran, and the 1993 raid on
Mogadishu, Somalia, by Rangers and Delta Force commandos, which failed at
the cost of 18 dead, 73 wounded, and two helicopters shot down.
Some in the Pentagon believe Bin Laden may not be in the caves of the Hindu
Kush after all, but could be hiding in the warren of slums outside Kandahar.
There, he would probably be protected by fervently committed guerrillas.
Going in after him would be an operation reminiscent of the Somalia disaster.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,574007,00.html
War looms in Black Sea enclave
Already bogged down in Chechnya, Russia fears new front opening up in Abkhazia
Kevin O'Flynn in Moscow and agencies in Tbilisi Monday October 15, 2001 The
Guardian
A long-running separatist conflict between Georgia and the breakaway Black
Sea enclave of Abkhazia threatened yesterday to erupt into open conflict and
spread across the Caucasus region.
Abkhazian officials said their fighters clashed with guerrillas believed to
be ethnic Georgians and Chechens who have been operating out of the Kodor
gorge. The gorge is near Abkhazian-controlled territory in north-west Georgia.
The Abkhazian deputy defence minister, Garik Kupalba, said that his forces
trapped the guerrillas, who tried to break through the encirclement. "We
foresaw their plans and waited for them in the right place," Mr Kupalba said.
He said 15 guerrillas were killed and several Abkhazian fighters were
wounded. The casualty figures could not be independently confirmed.
About 100 guerrillas, believed to be led by a Chechen commander, Ruslan
Gelayhev, broke out of the encirclement on Saturday. They had split into
smaller groups and were heading towards the Russian border to the north and
the Georgian border to the east, Abkhazian defence minister, Vladimir
Mikanba, told the Interfax news agency.
"I think we all have a major war ahead of us," an Abkhazian defence official
told the French news agency AFP.
Abkhazia accuses the Georgian government of being behind attacks by the
guerrillas and has appealed to Russia for help. The fighting has worsened
existing tension between Russia and Georgia.
Backed by Russia and a small group of Chechen fighters, Abkhazia won
independence from Georgia after a bloody civil war in 1994. Since then,
nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers have tried to police a shaky ceasefire,
threatened by the presence of up to 250,000 Georgian refugees displaced by
the 1994 fighting that saw Abkhazia separate from Georgia. The small enclave
has yet to win any international recognition, though.
Russia reinforced its border with Abkhazia last week as Georgia moved troops
towards the enclave. In Moscow the defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, has said
that Russia is "extremely worried" that some of the rebels might cross the
border into Russian territory.
Chechen warlords and the Abkhaz are traditional allies, hence the presence
of the Chechen fighters in the war against Georgia.
But things got even trickier when anti-Moscow fighters fled Chechnya to find
refuge from Russian bombing in the remote Pankiss gorge in Georgia. Russia
now claims Georgia has let these Chechen rebels into Abkhazia.
Georgia has publicly denied the accusation, though some officials in Tbilisi
have admitted that Chechens control the area of the Pankiss gorge.
Last week the Georgian parliament ordered Russian peacekeepers out of the
region within three months.
One Kremlin spokesman is on record as saying that if the peacekeepers left,
Abkhazia would turn "into a zone of chaos and pose a threat for the entire
region". But the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has been more
circumspect, saying Russia would not be drawn into the conflict.
"If the Georgian leadership accepts all responsibility, before the
international community and its own public [for security in the region],
then we are ready to withdraw the peacekeepers," Mr Putin said on Friday in
response to the Georgian parliament's move.
Whether he would really pull his troops out, however, was unclear.
Abkhazian officials say there will be terrible consequences if their Russian
protectors go. "The peace forces are the only guarantor of peace and
stability in the region. We do not rule out that in the event of their
withdrawal large-scale military operations would be set in motion," Astamur
Tania, a spokesman for the Abkhazian leadership, said.
The Abkhaz prime minister, Anri Dzhergeniya, said yesterday that the enclave
would seek security by applying to join the Russian Federation as an
associate member.
· President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine admitted for the first time yesterday
that the crash of a Russian airliner in the Black Sea that killed all 78
people on board 11 days ago was probably caused by a Ukrainian missile that
went astray.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,567333,00.html
The west has won
Radical Islam can't beat democracy and capitalism. We're still at the end of
history
Francis Fukuyama Thursday October 11, 2001 The Guardian
A stream of commentators have been asserting that the tragedy of September
11 proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that
we had reached the end of history. It is, on the face of it, insulting to
the memory of those who died to declare that this unprecedented attack did
not rise to the level of a historical event. But the way in which I used the
word history was different: it referred to the progress over the centuries
toward modernity, characterised by institutions like democracy and capitalism.
My observation, made in 1989 on the eve of the collapse of communism, was
that this evolutionary process did seem to be bringing ever larger parts of
the world toward modernity. And if we looked beyond liberal democracy and
markets, there was nothing else towards which we could expect to evolve;
hence the end of history. While there were retrograde areas that resisted
that process, it was hard to find a viable alternative civilisation that
people actually wanted to live in after the discrediting of socialism,
monarchy, fascism and other types of authoritarianism.
This view has been challenged by many people, and perhaps most articulately
by Samuel Huntington. He argued that rather than progressing toward a single
global system, the world remained mired in a "clash of civilisations" in
which six or seven major cultural groups would co-exist without converging
and constitute the new fracture lines of global conflict. Since the
successful attack on the centre of global capitalism was evidently
perpetrated by Islamic extremists unhappy with the very existence of western
civilisation, observers have been handicapping the Huntington "clash" view
over my own "end of history" hypothesis.
I believe that in the end I remain right: modernity is a very powerful
freight train that will not be derailed by recent events, however painful.
Democracy and free markets will continue to expand as the dominant
organising principles for much of the world. But it is worthwhile thinking
about what the true scope of the present challenge is.
Modernity has a cultural basis. Liberal democracy and free markets do not
work everywhere. They work best in societies with certain values whose
origins may not be entirely rational. It is not an accident that modern
liberal democracy emerged first in the Christian west, since the
universalism of democratic rights can be seen as a secular form of Christian
universalism.
The central question raised by Huntington is whether institutions of
modernity will work only in the west, or whether there is something broader
in their appeal that will allow them to make headway elsewhere. I believe
there is. The proof lies in the progress that democracy and free markets
have made in regions such as east Asia, Latin America, orthodox Europe,
south Asia and even Africa. Proof lies also in the millions of developing
world immigrants who vote with their feet every year to live in western
societies. The flow of people moving in the opposite direction, and the
number who want to blow up what they can of the west, is by contrast
negligible.
But there does seem to be something about Islam, or at least the
fundamentalist versions of Islam that have been dominant in recent years,
that makes Muslim societies particularly resistant to modernity. Of all
contemporary cultural systems, the Islamic world has the fewest democracies
(Turkey alone qualifies), and contains no countries that have made the
transition to developed nation status in the manner of South Korea or
Singapore.
There are plenty of non-western people who prefer the economic part of
modernity and hope to have it without having to accept democracy as well.
There are others who like both the economic and political versions of
modernity, but just can't figure out how to make it happen. For them,
transition to western-style modernity may be long and painful. But there are
no insuperable cultural barriers to prevent them from getting there, and
they constitute about four-fifths of the world's people.
Islam, by contrast, is the only cultural system that seems regularly to
produce people like Osama bin Laden or the Taliban who reject modernity
lock, stock and barrel. This raises the question of how representative such
people are of the larger Muslim community, and whether this rejection is
somehow inherent in Islam. For if the rejectionists are more than a lunatic
fringe, then Huntington is right that we are in for a protracted conflict
made dangerous by virtue of their technological empowerment.
The answer that politicians east and west have been putting out since
September 11 is that those sympathetic with the terrorists are a "tiny
minority" of Muslims, and that the vast majority are appalled by what
happened. It is important to say this to prevent all Muslims from becoming
targets of hatred. The problem is that hatred of America and what it stands
for are clearly much more widespread.
Certainly the group of people willing to go on suicide missions against the
US is tiny. But sympathy may be manifest in nothing more than initial
feelings of schadenfreude at the sight of the collapsing towers, a sense of
satisfaction that the US was getting what it deserved, to be followed by pro
forma expressions of disapproval. By this standard, sympathy for the
terrorists is characteristic of much more than a "tiny minority"of Muslims,
extending from the middle classes in countries like Egypt to immigrants in
the west.
This broader dislike and hatred would seem to represent something much
deeper than mere opposition to American policies like support for Israel or
the Iraq embargo, encompassing a hatred of the underlying society. After
all, many people around the world, including many Americans, disagree with
US policies, but this does not send them into paroxysms of anger and
violence. Nor is it necessarily a matter of ignorance about the quality of
life in the west. The suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta was a well-educated man
from a well-to-do Egyptian family who lived and studied in the US for years.
Perhaps the hatred is born out of a resentment of western success and Muslim
failure.
But rather than psychologise the Muslim world, it makes more sense to ask
whether radical Islam constitutes a serious alternative to western liberal
democracy. (Radical Islam has virtually no appeal in the contemporary world
apart from those who are culturally Islamic to begin with.) For Muslims
themselves, political Islam has proved much more appealing in the abstract
than in reality. After 23 years of rule by fundamentalist clerics, most
Iranians, especially the young, would like to live in a far more liberal
society. Afghans who have experienced Taliban rule feel much the same.
Anti-American hatred does not translate into a viable political program for
Muslim societies to follow.
We remain at the end of history because there is only one system that will
continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic west.
This does not imply a world free from conflict, nor the disappearance of
culture. But the struggle we face is not the clash of several distinct and
equal cultures fighting amongst one another like the great powers of
19th-century Europe. The clash consists of a series of rearguard actions
from societies whose traditional existence is indeed threatened by
modernisation. The strength of the backlash reflects the severity of this
threat. But time is on the side of modernity, and I see no lack of US will
to prevail.
• Reprinted with permission of the Wall Street Journal, 2001. Dow Jones &
Company, Inc.
• Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and author of The
End of History and the Last Man
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