Three phases were envisaged, firstly, ending terrorism, normalising Palestinian life and building Palestinian institutions; secondly, (June to December 2003) focusing on creating an independent Palestinian state; and thirdly establishing agreement on “permanent status” and an end to Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
As you know, there has been no progress towards achieving even the first of these aims, for two reasons. Firstly, the Israeli government has deliberately frustrated any effort to build Palestinian institutions and secondly, terrorism has proved far more intractable than Bush might have thought.
In May thirty people were killed in an Al-Qaeda attack in Saudi Arabia, including eight Americans. Cars packed with explosives were driven at speed into three foreign housing compounds. The US pledged revenge and the Saudis promised a crackdown. On July 5 there was a suicide bomb attack, probably by Chechen separatists, on a Moscow rock concert and at least 20 died.
On August 25 46 people died in two Bombay car bombs and detonators were found on a railway line that was to carry Hindu pilgrims. Indian authorities blame the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India. The Interior Minister Mr Chagan Bhujibal said it was revenge for riots in Gujarat in which 1000 people, mainly Muslims, died in 2002. Last month there were two major bomb attacks in Istanbul a week apart that left more than 40 dead and many hundreds injured.
That’s the point about Al-Qaeda and its myriad cells. You just don’t know where they might strike and, buoyed by the cult of martyrdom, they have almost no fears for themselves. To die is to enter paradise. The news that an Algerian had been arrested in Northern Ireland allegedly to do with Al-Qaeda-related activities and that he had previously lived for a year in Dublin has left a lot of people scratching their heads and a few residents of the Dublin 4 Embassy Mile a little nervous.
Many people also wonder how and why the ‘war on terror’ is so selective. Why pick on, say Iran and not Saudi Arabia? And if you’re bringing ‘freedom’ to downtrodden dictatorships, why isolate North Korea and not Zimbabwe? Why hasn’t Burma been freed from the tyranny of an army dictatorship every bit as rotten and repressive as Saddam’s? And there’s a good half dozen corrupt dictatorships in the ‘Stans’ north of Iran, each overflowing with oil…
Ah, maybe that’s it.
When one looks at the degree to which the US has destabilised democratic governments it disapproved of and accommodated corrupt dictatorships that played ball with it, one could be forgiven for thinking that ‘terrorism’, in George Bush’s mind, means any armed resistance to American or American-backed interests. It’s less about the terror than about the targets.
Any reasonable person is resolutely opposed to terrorism. But regrettably, the world is full of terror and violence. The way you deal with it is to give people a stake in peace, to give them a share in the goodies, to forge a common interest with them, and not their despotic rulers. But that would threaten the maximisation of profits by global companies, some of which are very close to the Bush regime.