Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Wharton and our guest today is, our first guest actually got a phone number for Fred Bronfman, so we are going to be talking with him in half an hour.
But first, Phyllis Bennett, she is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.
Her books include Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and Challenging Empire and also Ending the U.S. War in Afghanistan, a Primer.
And she, like Fred Bronfman, writes for Alternet.org.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing?
Very well, good to be with you.
Good, well I'm glad to have you here.
So, is Moss hysteria being ginned up to bolster support for the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Yeah, I'm afraid that it is.
I think that part of the reason that this campaign, this crusade, if you will, has taken off the way it has, is precisely because over the last several years, the fear factor that was so much part of the driving force behind the public support that did exist for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been diminishing.
And as the fear diminished, support for the wars diminished.
And part of the result of that fear diminishing was that the area where the attacks, those terrible attacks of 9-11 happened, became something closer to normal.
So in reclaiming them as, quote, hallowed ground, or holy space, or whatever term you want to use, what that means is, if that ground is holy, then the wars are holy, and you can't criticize them.
So I think that much of the energy behind this really has to do with building up new support for the wars.
It's funny, it reminds me, like, Patrick Coburn's book about Muqtada al-Sadr, and he goes through some of the history of all the different Shiite shrines in Iraq, and the history of why they're shrines and stuff, because this one guy got in this one battle where, against all odds, he won, or he was so surrounded, he lost, but that's why he's our heroic martyr, or whatever it was.
This is what 9-11, what Ground Zero, as they call it, is to the American civic religion, right?
This is like the place, this is like Mount Vernon or something.
Well, there certainly are a big chunk of folks who have tried to make it that.
Luckily, from the beginning, there's been a pushback, so it never was able to stop the changes in how people perceive it, but that's been a big problem, absolutely.
The horrific attacks stand on their own, in my view.
They were a horrific attack.
The question of what happens on September 12th becomes, to me, the bigger issue, and what the U.S. chose on September 12th is what has put us and the whole world at such great risk.
But I think what we're seeing now, and it's important, because in the fight back against those who would say that there should not be an Islamic community center, or a, quote, mosque, even though it's not really a mosque, anywhere near it, the argument is sort of insane.
It's like, it's too close.
Well, would four blocks be okay?
Would ten blocks be okay?
Is all of Manhattan not okay, and then you have to go to Queens?
I mean, is that really what we're talking about here?
The argument really makes no sense.
Well, and you know, it's funny, too, because we can talk all about the motivation of the hijackers and Ayman al-Zawahiri and all these guys, and what it was really about, as opposed to Islam, if we want, but it also seems like this is the result of so many decisions that were taken wrong, and not just Bush and them declaring war on 60 nations, but really the decision made from the beginning to wallow in self-pity and victimhood over 9-11, instead of being tough about it, instead of saying, okay, look, you know, they got us really good, and this was really sad, but you know what?
We're going to be okay.
We're going to actually send somebody to look for Ayman al-Zawahiri instead of Saddam Hussein, for example, something like that, but ultimately, you know, we're Tim the Tool Man, not Oprah Winfrey here, right?
What's a little bit of toughness about having a stiff upper lip?
And people would say about Israel that, you know, they'll have a suicide bombing in Israel, and then they go about their day.
They don't let it terrorize them right out of their society, and now, I mean, why there are bombs going off in Israel is a different subject, but you understand what I'm saying.
Like, we decided to turn this whole thing into, like, a therapy session, you know?
I think that there's an aspect of that in terms of how support was generated within the U.S. public.
I think I would not want to call it a therapy session because it's been so lethal for people in so many countries around the world, but I think that your point is absolutely right, that this was a decision.
I don't like to say we on this one.
The American people were not given any kind of choices here.
The choice we were given was either we go to war or we let them get away with it.
Those were the two options, and the option of let them get away with it, whoever they means in that context, was not a good option, so people followed a war president into war.
There was no option presented.
It goes to the question of what leadership, how leadership used that fear, that fear that set up a situation of political paralysis where almost everyone was afraid and the only answer to fear was, well, we're going to go to war and that's somehow going to keep us safe.
There were voices right from the beginning that said no.
There was the heroic Barbara Lee, Congresswoman from California, who was the only one who voted no on the resolution authorizing the use of force.
She as a result had to have police protection for six months because of the death threats made against her.
But it was an extraordinary moment of possibility.
I was writing a book at the time called Before and After U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis that looks at kind of what changed and what didn't change with September 11.
And one of the things I got to do in that book was write the speech that George Bush should have written the night of the attacks, where he would have after finishing reading My Pet Goat to the Children and ordering his pilot to get down on the ground for God's sakes and let me speak to the American people and stop just driving around up here because you're afraid that something's going to happen to the plane or something, take some real leadership.
He could have said, this is a horrific attack and we are going to find who was ever responsible and bring them to justice.
And to do that, we know now that we need international cooperation, that we need institutions like the International Criminal Court, that we need to empower it with the ability to find defendants and bring them to justice.
It's why we need the United Nations.
It's why we need to work with other countries.
Instead, what we heard was, we're going to war.
And despite the fact that the people who had attacked us were all dead, and the fact that none of them were Afghans, the fact that none of them lived in Afghanistan, they lived in Hamburg, they didn't train in Afghanistan, they trained in Florida, they didn't go to flight school in Afghanistan, they went to flight school in Minnesota, despite all of that, because they were inspired by somebody in Afghanistan, that was enough.
We're going to attack Afghanistan and try and in doing so, transform the whole Middle East, and oh, by the way, this isn't really about Afghanistan, it's really about Iraq, and we'll figure out later what the excuses are.
That was what we were given.
There was, from the moment of the attacks, a mobilization, the beginning of a movement that said no, that said war is not the answer to this.
The organization that was crafted within days, called September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, made up of people whose loved ones had been killed in the attacks, mainly in the Trade Center, a few at the Pentagon, and they came together to say, killing more people is not going to bring our loved ones back.
They traveled right away to Afghanistan and said, we want to meet with Afghans who are now at risk of the war that we know is coming.
So there's been a fight back from the beginning.
But certainly at the level of people in power in Washington, particularly within the Bush administration and the neocons that surrounded him, there was no choice.
This was going to be a war.
This was the opportunity to extend US power, to consolidate US control of strategic resources, to build new bases, all of those things.
So I think that we're seeing very much the price of all of that.
And part of the ideological framework of it all was that you needed the other.
You didn't have communism anymore.
Now you had terrorism, and that meant this was all about Islam.
This was about Muslims.
So that's the link.
All right.
Now, hold it right there, Phyllis.
Hold it right there.
We've got to go out and take this break, listen to some silly commercials, and then we'll come back with Phyllis Bennis from the Huffington Post and Alternate and the Institute for Policy Studies after this.
You're listening to the best Liberty-oriented audio streamed around the clock, on the air and online.
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FM.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm talking with Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies, and we're talking about all this renewed anti-Muslim hysteria.
And I'm reminded of the fact that right after September 11th, Colin Powell, who's no hero, said to George Bush something along the lines of, now's our chance.
We've got to get a peace settlement in Palestine.
And George Bush Jr. started talking about a two-state solution there, a Palestinian state, and working that out.
And Powell, I think, publicly recognized that this is driving the resentment against the United States that is creating terrorist problems for us, Israel's continued lack of peaceful relations with the Palestinians.
And then I think Mearsheimer and Walt tell the story the best in the book, The Israel Lobby, about how Tom DeLay and the right-wing born-again Christians came and said, no, you don't, or you'll be another one-term Bush like your dad.
And Bush Jr. backed off.
So, anyway, that brings up the importance of the Israel-Palestine issue when it comes to the question of terrorism against American citizens, like we saw on September 11th.
And of course, it's in the news that George Mitchell and Barack Obama are working to bring face-to-face peace talks back to existence over there in Palestine-Israel, as you call it in the title of your book, instead of the other way around, like it usually is in the media, Phyllis.
What do you think is going to happen here?
Well, I don't think very much is going to happen.
I think this is a U.S. initiative.
The question is going to be, what is Barack Obama prepared to do when the talks fail?
What's different this time is that they're probably likely to fail visibly much sooner than is usually the case.
It usually takes months or even a year before people admit that this set of talks isn't going anywhere.
This time, we have an internal deadline, which is the September 26th end of what the Israelis like to call their settlement freeze.
In fact, it hasn't been a settlement freeze.
Settlement construction and settlement expansion has continued to go on, but at a slightly slower pace.
After the 26th of September, Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet has said that they plan not to extend the freeze and to move forward full force with expanding existing settlements, building new settlements, anything they want to do in expanding their occupation, making this so-called two-state solution really impossible if it isn't already.
So when the Palestinian leader, the chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, who is always addressed as Mr. President because he happens to be president of the Palestinian Authority, but that's not supposed to be who gets to negotiate.
Only the PLO can do that, but nonetheless, that gets forgotten.
But Mahmoud Abbas has made clear that while he's willing to come to these talks, he really has no choice since his position is dependent on U.S. funding and U.S. support, that he will not continue the talks after the 26th if the Israelis continue their settlement building.
So what the Obama administration has done has been to send longtime Israel supporter and U.S. diplomat in charge of Israel issues, Dennis Ross, to Israel over the last few days to try and figure out some wiggle room.
They want to figure out some language they could use that President Obama could propose and Prime Minister Netanyahu would grudgingly agree to sign that wouldn't make his right-wing cabinet too angry, and that would be just enough to satisfy Mahmoud Abbas, and so everybody's happy and they can go on with the fiction that somehow these talks are going to lead to a Palestinian state and an end to Israeli occupation.
The problem with it is, number one, we don't need more photo ops.
Number two, the U.S. is probably the wrong broker.
The country that provides $30 billion over the next 10 years in military aid to Israel, provides its impunity at the United Nations, prevents it from being held accountable for its violations of international law, is hardly in the right position to act as an honest broker.
However, it is the most powerful country in the region, so on one level it makes sense if it was prepared to put forward a set of negotiations actually grounded in international law, rather than the current situation, which is basically to talk about the Palestine playground.
You know, this is about conflict resolution.
We want both sides to make nice.
Use your inside voices, boys and girls.
This is the attitude.
It's conflict resolution as if these were two equal players, as if this was a border dispute between Peru and Ecuador, you know, where you have two countries arguing over where the border line should have been drawn.
This is an occupied population and an occupying country that is by far the most powerful country in the region in terms of conventional weapons, the only nuclear weapons country in the region, the only country with absolute access to U.S. weapons at the highest level and U.S. money and U.S. political support, and somehow we're supposed to imagine that when they come and have dinner together in Washington, that everything is equal and they both sides have to make concessions.
Not even that.
We're supposed to pretend that the Palestinians occupy Israel and won't leave the poor little helpless Israelis alone ever.
The poor things.
Exactly.
And so.
Well, and look, the point here is that Mohammed Atta died killing Americans because of Palestine.
It's as simple as that.
I read it in Perfect Soldiers by the I believe Vietnam veteran and proud American patriot Terry McDermott, L.A.
Times reporter.
This is what they sat around in their apartment in Hamburg complaining about all day as they'd watch Israel in Lebanon and Palestine, and they would say Americans must pay for this.
That I'm sorry.
I missed what you said at the beginning, Mohammed Atta, the ringleader, hijacker of September 11th.
I have no idea if that's true.
And then he and Ramzi bin al-Shibh and their buddies went to Afghanistan and met Ayman al-Zawahiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and got the job to fly the planes for sure.
I would be very reluctant to say we know why I think Terry McDermott interviewed all their friends in Hamburg.
What I do know is this, and that is that around the world, most people of all faiths, of no faith, et cetera, believe that what was done on September 11th was wrong.
The people who understood why they may have done it and thought, well, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea, had everything to do with U.S. policy in the region, which includes our policy towards Israel and Palestine, also includes our earlier invasion of Iraq, the sanctions against Iraq, all of these things.
Our arming of the repressive governments throughout the region, our stationing troops in places like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, all of these things have antagonized people throughout the world.
It doesn't legitimize what's done.
But if we're serious about making sure it never happens again, we damn well better understand why it happens in the first place.
So I don't think we know, and I'd be a little hesitant to accept one set of interviews that said they talked about X.
I'm sure that was part of what they talked about.
I'm sure there were other things as well.
It's a factor in what leads to these kinds of attacks.
I don't know that we can ever, that any country, any government, any political force, any civil society can ever prevent any particular act of ultimate extremism.
But what we can do is make sure that our policies don't provide people an excuse to provide support to people who might do it.
That's what's key.
Right.
Of course.
And as Michael Schroer pointed out, the Ayatollah Khomeini denounced our culture to no effect for 10 years.
Osama Bin Laden denounced our policy to absolute effect for fewer, and had a string of bombings and successfully baited our country into invading Afghanistan.
So it works, to point out the truth.
Thanks Phyllis.
Thank you.
