By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 5th March 2002

Those of us who opposed the bombing of Afghanistan warned that the war between nations would not stop there. Now, as Tony Blair prepares the British people for an attack on Iraq, the conflict seems to be proliferating faster than most of us predicted. But there is another danger, which we have tended to neglect: that of escalating hostilities WITHIN the nations waging this war. The racial profiling which has become the unacknowledged focus of America’s new security policy is in danger of provoking the very clash of cultures its authors appear to perceive.

Yesterday’s Guardian told the story of Adeel Akhtar, a British Asian man who flew to the United States for an acting audition. When his plane arrived at JFK airport in New York, he and his female friend were handcuffed. He was taken to a room and questioned for several hours. The officials asked him whether he had friends in the Middle East, or knew anyone who approved of the attacks on September 11. His story will be familiar to hundreds of people of Asian or Middle Eastern origin.

I have just obtained a copy of a letter sent last week by a 50 year-old British Asian woman (who doesn’t want to be named) to the US Immigration Service. At the end of January, she flew to JFK to visit her sister, who is suffering from cancer. At the airport, immigration officials found that on a previous visit she had overstayed her visa. She explained that she had been helping her sister, who was very ill, and had applied for an extension. When the officers told her she would have to return to Britain, she accepted their decision but asked to speak to the British consul.

They refused her request, but told her she could ring the Pakistani consulate if she wished. She explained that she was British, not Pakistani, as her passport showed. The guards then started to interrogate her. How many languages did she speak? How long had she lived in Britain? They smashed the locks on her suitcases and took her fingerprints. Then she was handcuffed and chained and marched through the departure lounge. “I felt like the guards were parading me in front of the passengers like their prize-catch. Why was I put in handcuffs? I am a fifty-year old housewife from the suburbs of London. What threat did I pose to the safety of the other passengers?”

Last week, a correspondent for the Times found 30 men and one woman camped in a squalid hotel in Mogadishu, in Somalia. They were all African Americans of Somali origin, who had arrived in the United States as babies or children. Most were professionals with secure jobs and stable lives. In January, just after the release of Black Hawk Down (the film about the failed US military mission in Somalia), they were rounded up. They were beaten, threatened with injections and refused phone calls and access to lawyers. Then, a fortnight ago, with no charges made or reasons given, they were summarily deported to Somalia. Now, without passports, papers or money, in an alien and frightening country, they are wondering whether they will ever see their homes again.

All these people are victims of a new kind of racial profiling which the United States government applies but denies. The US attorney-general has called for some 5000 men of Arab origin to be questioned by federal investigators. Since September 11, over 1000 people who were born in the Middle East have been detained indefinitely for “immigration infractions”. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has recorded hundreds of recent instances of alleged official discrimination in the US. Muslim women have been strip-searched at airports, men have been dragged out of bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night. It reports that evidence which remains shielded from the suspect, of the kind permitted by the recent US Patriot Act, “has been used almost exclusively against Muslims and Arabs in America”. Brown-skinned people in the US are now terrorist suspects. Some officials appear to regard them as guilty until proven otherwise.

Similar policies appear to govern the judicial treatment of detainees. During his press conference on 28 December, President Bush initially misunderestimated a question, and provided a revealing answer. “Have you decided,” he was asked, “that anybody should be subjected to a military tribunal?” Bush replied, “I excluded any Americans.” The questioner pointed out that he meant to ask whether Bush had made any decisions about the captives in Guantanamo Bay. But what the president had revealed was that the differential treatment of those foreign fighters and John Walker Lindh, the “American Talib” currently being tried in a federal court in Virginia, is not an accident of process, but policy. He couldn’t treat a white American like the captives in Camp X-ray and expect to get away with it.

These attitudes pre-date the attack on New York. “Patterns of Global Terrorism”, a document published by the US counterterrorism coordinator in April, appears to define international terror as violence directed at US citizens, US commercial interests or white citizens of other nations. Black and brown-skinned people are the perpetrators of terror, but not its victims. In Angola, for example, the “most significant incident” in the year 2000 was the kidnapping of three Portuguese construction workers by rebels. The murder of hundreds of Angolan civilians is unrecorded. In Sierra Leone terrorism, the report suggests, has afflicted only foreign journalists, aid workers and peacekeepers. In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army’s appears to have done nothing but kidnap and murder Italian missionaires. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where terror sponsored by six African states has led to the deaths of some three million people, isn’t mentioned. Yet domestic terrorism in the United Kingdom and Spain is covered at length.

There is, of course, vicious racism on other sides as well. Bin Laden threatened a holy war against Jews. The men who kidnapped the journalist Daniel Pearl forced him to announce that he was a Jew before cutting his throat. I have lost count of the number of emails I’ve received from opponents of the Afghan war in Pakistan and the Middle East, claiming that 4000 Jews were evacuated from the World Trade Centre before the attacks.

This makes security policies based on racial discrimination even more dangerous. By treating brown-skinned people as if they are the natural enemies of the United States, the government could generate conflict where there was none before. At the same time this policy establishes splendid opportunities for terrorists with white skins, as they become, to the eyes of officials, all but invisible.

This is the morass into which Tony Blair is now stepping. “These are not people like us,” he said of the Iraqi leadership on Sunday. “They are not people who abide by the normal rules of human behaviour.” Some would argue that this quality establishes their kinship with British ministers. But to persuade us that we should go to war with Iraq, Blair must first make its leaders appear as remote from ourselves as possible.

The attack on Iraq, when it comes, could be the beginning of a third world war. It may, as hints dropped by the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggest, turn out to be the first phase of a war involving many nations. It may also become a war against the third world, and its diaspora in the nations of the first.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 12th February 2002

Never was victory so bitter. Those liberals who supported the war in Afghanistan, and so confidently declared that their values had triumphed in November, must now be feeling a little exposed. Precisely who has lost, and what the extent of their loss may be, is yet to be determined, but there can now be little doubt that the dangerous and illiberal people who control the US military machine have won. The bombing of Afghanistan is already starting to look like the first shot in a new imperial war.

In 30 years’ time we may be able to tell whether or not the people of Afghanistan have benefited from the fighting there. The murderous Taliban have been overthrown. Women, in Kabul at any rate, have been allowed to show their faces in public, and readmitted into professional life. Some $3bn has so far been pledged for aid and reconstruction. But the only predictable feature of Afghan politics is their unpredictability. In the absence of an effective peace-keeping force, the tensions between the clan leaders could burst into open warfare when the fighting season resumes in the spring. Iran, Russia and the US are beginning, subtly, to tussle over the nation’s future, with potentially disastrous consequences for its people.

In the meantime, seven million remain at risk of starvation. Some regions have been made safer for aid workers; others have become more dangerous, as looting and banditry fill the vacuum left by the Taliban’s collapse. Already, some refugees are looking back with nostalgia to the comparative order and stability of life under that brutal government. For the Afghan people, the only certain and irreversible outcome of the war so far is that some thousands of civilians have been killed.

But other interests in Afghanistan are doing rather nicely. On January 29, the IMF’s assistant director for monetary and exchange affairs suggested that the country should abandon its currency and adopt the dollar instead. This would, he explained, be a “temporary” measure, though, he conceded, “when an economy dollarizes, it takes a little while to undollarize.” The day before, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development revealed that part of its aid package to Afghan farmers would take the form of GM seed.

Both Hamid Karzai, the interim president, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy, were formerly employed as consultants to Unocal, the US oil company which spent much of the 1990s seeking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. Unocal appears to have dropped the scheme, but smaller companies (such as Chase Energy and Caspian Energy Consulting) are now lobbying for its revival. In October the president of Turkmenistan wrote to the United Nations, pressing for the pipeline’s construction.

More importantly, the temporary US bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Caspian states appear to be putting down roots. US military “tent cities” have now been established in 13 places in the states bordering Afghanistan. New airports are being built and garrisons expanded. In December, the US assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jones promised that “when the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region.”

This is beginning to look rather like the “new imperium” which commentators such as Charles Krauthammer have been urging on the US government. Already there are signs that confrontation with the “axis of evil” is coming to involve more than just containing terrorism. Writing in the Korea Times last month, Henry Kissinger insisted that, “The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States, though no doubt there was some intelligence contact between Iraqi intelligence and one of the chief plotters. The challenge of Iraq is essentially geopolitical.”

An asymmetric world war of the kind George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have proposed provides the justification, long sought by the defence companies and their sponsored representatives in Washington, for a massive increase in arms spending. Eisenhower warned us to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” But we have disregarded his warning, and forgotten how dangerous the people seeking vast state contracts can be.

In October I wrote that “the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labelled “a gift from Iraq”. This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion.” The suggestion was widely ridiculed.

This week’s New Scientist reports that the FBI has yet to catch the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks. “Investigators are virtually certain of one thing, though: it was an inside job. The anthrax attacker is an American scientist — and worse, one from within the US’s own biodefence establishment. … If he wished to scale up US military action against Iraq, he almost succeeded — many in Washington tried hard to see Saddam Hussein’s hand in the attacks. If he wished merely to make the US pour billions into biodefence, he did succeed.”

Now Bush has secured a further $48bn for the defence contractors who helped him into office, and those who contested the first phase of his war are still reviled, by people such as the British minister Peter Hain, as “rejectionists” and “isolationists”. In truth, it is those who supported the war who have endorsed US isolationism. Hain insists that Britain will use its influence to restrain the “hawks on Capitol Hill”, but I fear that Henry Kissinger comes closer to the truth when he suggests that “Britain will not easily abandon the pivotal role based on its special relationship with the United States that it has earned for itself in the evolution of the crisis. … A determined American policy thus has more latitude than is generally assumed.” Jack Straw’s newfound enthusiasm for the US missile defence programme (which necessitated, of course, the unilateral abandonment of the anti-ballistic missile treaty) suggests that Dr Kissinger is rather better versed in British politics than Mr Hain.

Over the past few weeks, the men who run the military-industrial complex have shoved aside the government of the Philippines, despatched 16 Black Hawk helicopters to Colombia, arrested the Cuban investigators seeking to foil a bomb plot in Miami, alarmed Russia and China by scrambling for central Asia, begun developing a new tactical nuclear weapon, and all but declared war on three nations. Yet still the armchair warriors who supported their bombing of Afghanistan cannot understand that these people now present a threat not just to terrorism but to the world.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th December 2001

The pre-Enlightenment has just been beaten by the post-Enlightenment. As the last fundamentalist fighters are hunted through the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the world’s most comprehensive attempt to defy modernity has been atomised. But this is not, as almost everyone claims, a triumph for civilisation; for the Taliban have been destroyed by a regime which is turning its back on the values it claims to defend.

In West Virginia, a 15 year-old girl is currently fighting the state’s Supreme Court. Six weeks ago, Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville High School school in Charleston. She had committed two horrible crimes. The first was to apply to found an anarchy club, the second was to come to classes in a T-shirt on which she had written “Against Bush, Against Bin Laden” and “When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America”. The headmaster claimed that Katie’s actions were disrupting other pupils’ education. “To my students,” he explained, “the concept of anarchy is something that is evil and bad.” The county court upheld her suspension, and at the end of November the state’s Supreme Court refused to hear the case she had lodged in defence of free speech.

Katie is just one of many young dissenters now battling for the most basic political freedoms. A few days before she was suspended from school, A.J. Brown, a 19 year-old woman studying at Durham Tech, North Carolina, answered the door to three security agents. They had been informed, they told her, that she was in possession of “anti-American material”. Someone had seen a poster on her wall, campaigning against George Bush’s use of the death penalty. They asked her whether she also possessed pro-Taliban propaganda. On October 10th a 22-year-old called Neil Godfrey was banned from boarding a plane travelling from Philadelphia to Phoenix because he was carrying a novel by the anarchist writer Edward Abbey. At the beginning of November, Nancy Oden, an anti-war activist on her way to a conference was surrounded at Bangor airport in Maine by soldiers with automatic weapons and forbidden to fly on the grounds that she was a “security risk”. These incidents and others like them become significant in the light of two distinct developments.

The first is the formal suspension of certain civil liberties by governments backing the war in Afghanistan. The new anti-terror acts approved in the United Kingdom and the US have, like the reinstatement of the CIA’s licence to kill, been widely reported. The measures introduced by some of the other allied governments are less well-known. In the Czech Republic, for example, a new law permits the prosecution of people expressing sympathy for the attacks on New York, or even of those sympathising with the sympathisers. Already the Czech journalist Tomas Pecina has been arrested and charged for criticising the use of the law, on the grounds that this makes him, too, a supporter of terrorism.

The second is the remarkably rapid development of surveillance technology, of the kind which has been deployed to such devastating effect in Afghanistan. Unmanned spyplanes which could follow the Taliban’s cars and detect the presence of human beings behind 100 feet of rock are both awesome and terrifying. Technologies like this, combined with CCTV, face recognition software, email and phone surveillance, microbugs, forensic science, the monitoring of financial transactions and the pooling of government databases ensure that governments now have the means, if they choose to deploy them, of following almost every move we make, every word we utter.

I made this point to a Labour MP a couple of days ago. He explained to me that it was “just ridiculous” to suggest that better technologies could lead to mass surveillance in Britain. Our defence against abuses by government is guaranteed not only by parliament, but also by the entire social framework in which parliament operates. Civil society will ensure that there is no danger of these technologies falling into the “wrong hands”.

But what we are witnessing in the United States is a rapid reversal of the civic response which might once have defended the rights and liberties of its citizens. Katie Sierra’s suspension was proposed by her school and upheld by the courts. The agents preventing activists from boarding planes were assisted by the airlines. The student accused of poster crime may well have been shopped by one of her neighbours. The state is scorching the constitution, and much of civil society is reaching for the bellows.

This, I fear, may be just the beginning. The new surveillance technology deployed in Afghanistan is merely one component of the US doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance”. The term covered, at first, only military matters: the armed forces sought to achieve complete mastery of land, sea, air, airwaves and space. But perhaps because this has been achieved too easily, the term has already begun to be used more widely, as commercial, fiscal and monetary policy, the composition of foreign governments and the activities of dissidents are redefined as matters of security. Another name for “full-spectrum dominance” is absolute power.

There are, of course, profound differences between the US and the UK. The United States sees itself as a wounded nation; many of its people feel desperately vulnerable and insecure. But while our cowardly MPs seek only to dissociate themselves from the victims of Torquemada Blair’s inquisitors, the Lord Chancellor’s mediaevel department is preparing to dispense with most jury trials, which are arguably now the foremost institutional restraint to the excesses of government.

The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other words, can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the liberties which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the human community — privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement — imply a dissociation from coherent community.

While those who seek to deny our liberties claim to defend individualism, in truth they gently engineer a conformity of belief and action which is drifting towards a new fundamentalism. This is an inevitable product of the fusion of state and corporate power. Capital, as Adam Smith shows us, strives towards monopoly. The states which defend it permit the planning permission, tax breaks, externalisation and blanket advertising which ensure that most of us shop in the same shops, eat in the same restaurants, wear the same clothes. The World Trade Organisation, World Bank and IMF apply the same economic and commercial prescription worldwide, enabling the biggest corporations to trade under the same conditions everywhere.

Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The pettiness of its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinise every detail of our lives, suggest that we could be about to encounter a new form of political control, swollen with success, unchecked by dissent. Nothing has threatened the survival of “Western values” as much as the triumph of the West.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 15th November 2001

The armchair warriors have proved no more merciful in victory than the Northern Alliance. Yesterday’s Sun turned over two pages to an editorial titled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. Christopher Hitchens raised the moral and intellectual tone of the debate in the Guardian yesterday with this lofty sentiment: “Well ha, ha, ha and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible”. Such magnanimity suggests to me that it is not Afghanistan which we have bombed into the Stone Age, but ourselves.

But almost everyone now agrees that this is the end of history, all over again. The sceptics have been routed as swiftly as the Taliban. George Bush and Tony Blair, with the help of their “daisy cutters” and cluster bombs, have ushered in a new, new world order, the long awaited golden age of democracy. But have the warriors of the West, both actual and virtual, really won? And if so, what precisely is the prize?

There’s no question that the advance of the Northern Alliance is a remarkable turnaround, which took the hawks as well as the doves by surprise. All of us — warriors and sceptics — overestimated the military difficulties of capturing Kabul. But the Telegraph’s repetition of Mrs Thatcher’s injunction — “just rejoice, rejoice” — may prove to be a little premature.

It would be rather easier to measure the success of the West’s war aims if those aims had not shifted with every presidential announcement. But a few key questions may help us to determine how much the B52s have achieved. The first and most obvious is: will the advance of the Northern Alliance lead to the overthrow of the barbarous Taliban? The answer is, almost certainly, yes; though they may persist as a guerilla force. The question this then begs is will it improve the lives of the Afghan people? Almost everyone appears to believe that it will. But we should be foolish to forget that just five years ago both Afghans and western diplomats welcomed the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, as it relieved the inhabitants of the murderous dominion of the men who now run the Northern Alliance. Yesterday the Telegraph claimed that the NA’s “fearful violence” towards Arab and Pakistani soldiers “is a shocking reminder of the fact that bin Laden’s zealots have been a hated army of occupation.” Well, perhaps. But it is also a shocking reminder of the fact that the Northern Alliance can be just as brutal as the hated regime it has displaced. To the claim Polly Toynbee made on these pages yesterday that “nothing could be worse” than the Taliban, one can only respond: don’t tempt fate.

The Alliance’s willingness to cooperate with western plans for Afghanistan is also questionable. Four days ago, we were told that its soldiers had been persuaded not to advance on Kabul, and this was judged a victory for the West. Now they have taken Kabul, and this too is hailed as a victory for the West. That the military action has not gone according to plan, in other words, is now presented as a vindication of the plan.

Given that the Northern Alliance has so far shown little interest in doing as the West requests, why should we assume it would be prepared to abandon its military gains for a “broad-based” political settlement? Countless comparisons to the outcome in Serbia have been made, as if this somehow offers proof that armed intervention leads inexorably to democracy. But Serbia, unlike Afghanistan, already possessed a mature democracy movement. Where is the Afghan equivalent? Where are the moderate leaders with which the West wants to replace the Taliban? Who among all the named credible candidates does not have blood on his hands? And will the fiercely independent Afghans accept the writ of the United Nations? Or, given that both Russia and the West have strategic and energy interests in central Asia, will it come to be seen in the same light as the Soviet occupation?

Will the advance of the Northern Alliance save people who are at risk of famine in Afghanistan? It will almost certainly save some of them. Much more aid is now entering the areas which have come under Northern Alliance control, though, like the retreating Taliban, the alliance fighters have been looting supplies and commandeering UN vehicles. But for thousands the help is likely to have arrived too late. The interruption of supplies during the eight weeks in which they should have been stockpiled for the winter means that many of those living in the valleys made inaccessible by snow will die before they can be reached.

Will it lead to the capture or killing of Osama Bin Laden? Possibly. Will it free the world from terrorism? No. Will it deliver regional or global security? Probably not. The Northern Alliance’s gains represented a bounty for Russia and a blow for Pakistan, whose government is now facing a far graver test in victory than it would have faced in defeat. Even in Britain, a new poll by the Today programme shows, 80% of Muslims are opposed to the West’s war.

But, as well as asking what this war has done to Asia, we must also ask what it has done to us. And here, it seems to me, the bugles sounding victory for civilised values are also sounding retreat.

The first and most obvious loss is our willing repudiation of the very basis of civilisation: human rights. The new terrorism bills in America and Britain have required the suspension of both the US constitution and the UK’s human rights act. Perhaps it’s because I’m writing this from inside a police cell in North Wales, but it seems to me that in trying to shut the terrorists out, we have merely imprisoned ourselves.

One of the last smart bombs deployed in Kabul destroyed the offices of Al Jazeera, the only truly independent major television station in the Arab world. Al Jazeera has consistently provided a voice for Muslims opposed to US military intervention in Afghanistan, as well as airing Bin Laden’s inflammatory videos. A few weeks ago Colin Powell sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to close it down, without success. Its destruction suggests that free speech and dissent have now joined terrorism as the business of “evil-doers”.

The second loss to the West is the triumph of war-war over jaw-jaw. The partial victory in Afghanistan appears to have convinced both governments and commentators that we can blast our way to world peace. No serious attempt was made, before the bombing began, to differentiate between just and unjust war. Justice in war, as almost every philosopher since Thomas Aquinas agrees, requires that the peaceful alternatives should first have been exhausted. There is plenty to suggest that the initial aim — to capture Bin Laden — could have been achieved without recourse to arms. The Taliban twice offered to hand him over on receipt of evidence pointing to his guilt: a much lower barrier to extradition than western governments would have raised. We appear to have made no attempt to discover whether or not they could have been taken at their word. Neither was a serious attempt made to remove the Taliban by diplomatic pressure exercised through Pakistan. Now justice appears to have been redefined as success, and war as the only route to peace.

This new triumphalism is sliding effortlessly into a new imperialism. It conflates armed and ethical success, mastery and morality. If this is a victory for civilisation, I would hate to see what defeat looks like.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th October 2001

“If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents,” George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, “they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.” I’m glad he said “any government”, as there’s one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention.

For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at Al-Qaeda’s door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush’s government.

Until January this year, WHISC was called “the School of the Americas”, or SOA. Since 1946 SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent’s most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch shows, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni.

In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala’s “D-2″, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the “anti-insurgency” campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt, and Mejia Victores studied at SOA.

In 1993, the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador’s death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school’s graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet’s secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.

Argentina’s dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru’s Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador’s Guillermo Rodriguez all benefitted from the school’s instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori’s Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico.

All this, the school’s defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA’s graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department’s report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven ex-pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year a SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its graduates from Colombia than from any other country.

The FBI defines terrorism as “violent acts …intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government”, which is a precise description of the activities of SOA’s graduates But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school’s training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses’ relatives.

Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself WHISC. As the school’s Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress, “Some of your bosses have told us that they can’t support anything with the name ‘School of the Americas’ on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name.” Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were “basically cosmetic.”

But visit WHISC’s website and you’ll see that the School of the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked “History” fails to mention it. WHISC’s courses, it tells us, “cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of counter drug operations.” Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren’t mentioned. Nor is the fact that WHISC’s “peace” and “human rights” options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them.

We can’t expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the Al-Qaeda training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the “evil-doers” in Fort Benning, Georgia?

Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school’s commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag.

You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But, try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and the war now being waged in Afghanistan.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd October 2001

“Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here”, Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the First World War ended, “that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?”. In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.

The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to regional control and the transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked, “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.” But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

Transporting all the Caspian basin’s fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia’s political and economic control over the Central Asian Republics, which is precisely what the West has spent ten years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of “diversifying energy supply” and to penetrate the world’s most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In South Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, the US oil company Unocal has been seeking since 1995 to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. The company’s scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that “oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America’s, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan.” Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal’s interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid “the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [a US oil consortium which worked in Saudi Arabia], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.” US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both Unocal’s plans and the government’s covert backing for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained “the only other possible route” for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in East Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan’s strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US Energy Information Administration reported that “Afghanistan’s significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan.” Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that a reinvigoration of these plans no longer figures in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of “Corridor 8″, an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

This is not the only long-term US interest in Afghanistan. American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance”, which means that the United States should control military, economic and political development all over the world. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that “China’s fundamental interests lie in … the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order”. In June, China and Russia pulled four Central Asian Republics into a “Shanghai Co-operation Organisation”. Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to “foster world multi-polarisation”, by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

If the United States succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing it with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if it then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944, “The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.” I believe that the United States government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naive to believe that this is all it is doing.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 16th October 2001

If satire died on the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, then last week its corpse was exhumed for a kicking. As head of the United Nations’ peacekeeping department, Kofi Annan failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebenica. Now, as Secretary General, he appears to have intepreted the UN charter as generously as possible to allow the attack on Afghanistan to go ahead.

Article 51 permits states to defend themselves against attack. It says nothing about subsequent retaliation. It offers no licence to attack people who might be harbouring a nation’s enemies. The bombing of Afghanistan, which began before the UN security council gave its approval, is legally contentious. Yet the man and the organisation who overlooked this obstacle to facilitate war are honoured for their contribution to peace.

Endowments like the Nobel Peace Prize are surely designed to reward self-sacrifice. Nelson Mandela gave up his liberty, FW de Clerk gave up his power, and both were worthy recipients of the prize. But Kofi Annan, the career bureaucrat, has given up nothing. He has been rewarded for doing as he is told, while nobly submitting to a gigantic salary and bottomless expense account.

Among the other nominees for the prize was a group whose qualifications were rather more robust. Members of Women in Black have routinely risked their lives in the hope of preventing war. They have stayed in the homes of Palestinians being shelled by Israeli tanks and have confronted war criminals in the Balkans. They have stood silently while being abused and spat at during vigils all over the world. But now, in this looking glass world in which war is peace and peace is war, instead of winning the peace prize the Women in Black have been labelled potential terrorists by the FBI and threatened with a grand jury investigation.

They are in good company. Earlier this year the director of the FBI named the chaotic but harmless organisations Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against Capitalism in the statement on terrorism he presented to the Senate. Now, partly as a result of his representations, the senate’s new terrorism bill, like Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, redefines the crime so broadly that members of Greenpeace are in danger of being treated like members of Al-Qaeda. The Bush doctrine — if you’re not with us, you’re against us — is already being applied.

This government by syllogism makes no sense at all. Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have challenged the US government; ergo anyone who challenges the government is a potential terrorist. That Bin Laden is, according to US officials, a “fascist”, while the other groups are progressives is irrelevant: every public hand raised in objection will from now on be treated as a public hand raised in attack. Given that OBL is not a progressive but is a millionaire, it would surely make more sense to round up and interrogate all millionaires.

Lumping Women in Black together with Al-Qaeda requires just a minor addition to the vocabulary: they have been jointly classified as “anti-American”. This term, as used by everyone from Donald Rumsfeld and the Daily Mail to Tony Blair and several contributers to the Guardian, applies not only to those who hate Americans, but also to those who have challenged US foreign and defence objectives. Implicit in this denunciation is a demand for uncritical support, for a love of government more consonant with the codes of Tsarist Russia than with the ideals upon which the United States were founded.

The charge of “anti-Americanism” is itself profoundly anti-American. If the United States does not stand for freedom of thought and speech, for diversity and dissent, then we have been deceived as to the nature of the national project. Were the founding fathers to congregate today to discuss the principles enshrined in their declaration of independence, they would be denounced as “anti-American” and investigated as potential terrorists. Anti-American means today precisely what un-American meant in the 1950s. It is an instrument of dismissal, a means of excluding your critics from rational discourse.

Under the new McCarthyism, this dismissal extends to anyone who seeks to promulgate a version of events other than that sanctioned by the US government. On September 20, President Bush told us that “this is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.” Two weeks later, Colin Powell met the emir of Qatar, to request that progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom be suppressed. Al-Jazeera is one of the few independent television stations in the Middle East, whose popularity is the result of its uncommon regard for freedom of speech. It is also the only station permitted to operate freely in Kabul: many of the images of the bombing of Afghanistan we’ve seen on TV were recorded by its cameramen. Powell’s request that it be squashed was a pre-emptive strike against freedom, which, he hoped, would prevent the world from seeing what was really happening once the bombing began.

Since then, both George Bush and Tony Blair have sought to prevent Al-Jazeera from airing video statements by Bin Laden, on the grounds of the preposterous schoolboy intrigue that they “might contain coded messages”. Over the weekend the government sought to persuade British broadcasters to restrict their coverage of the war. Blair’s spin doctors warned “You can’t trust them [the Taliban] in any way, shape, or form.” While true, this applies with equal force to the techniques employed by Downing Street. When Alastair Campbell starts briefing journalists about “Spin Laden”, it’s a case of the tarantula spinning against the money spider.

If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem to believe that this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current one. Many of those who now accept that babies were not thrown out of incubators in Kuwait, and that the Belgrano was fleeing when she was hit, are also prepared to believe everything we are being told about Afghanistan and the terrorism in the United States.

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. The magical appearance of the terrorists’ luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too good to be true. The dossier of “evidence” purporting to establish Bin Laden’s guilt consists largely of supposition and conjecture. The ration packs being dropped on Afghanistan have no conceivable purpose other than to create the false impression that starving people are being fed. Even the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labelled “a gift from Iraq”. This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion.

Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting. The true defenders of America are those who are now being told that they are anti-American.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 9th October 2001

Two weeks ago, the US Under Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, compared Afghanistan to a swamp, which must be drained to catch the snakes which hide there. His analogy may be rather more apt than he intended. Swamps, as everyone knows, are harder to get out of than they are to get into.

On Sunday night, the West took its first, irreversible step into the morass. It may well prove to be the only simple one on an ever more uncertain journey. But there is now no going back. Once you have initiated military action, you are committed to it, and all further adventures in Afghanistan need be armed. It is not clear that either the British or the US governments fully understand the implications.

Yesterday morning, some fifteen hours after the airstrikes began, the United Nations announced that it had halted convoys of food to Afghanistan. From now on, and for as long as the conflict lasts, the humanitarian aid which both Blair and Bush promised would be an integral component of this campaign must be delivered primarily with the help of the armed forces. They don’t seem to have any idea what this responsibility entails.

The military answer to the country’s crisis so far has taken the form of 37,500 yellow ration packs, dropped from transport planes into regions in which hungry people are believed to live. Each of them contains around 2,200 calories: roughly enough to sustain one person for one day.

If you believe, as some commentators do, that this is an impressive or even meaningful operation, I urge you to conduct a simple calculation. The United Nations estimates that there are 7.5 million hungry people in Afghanistan. If every ration pack reached a starving person, then one two hundredth of the vulnerable were fed by the humanitarian effort on Sunday. The US Department of Defense has announced that it possesses a further two million of these packs, which it might be prepared to drop. If so, they could feed 27 per cent of the starving for one day.

Four weeks remain before winter envelops Afghanistan, during which enough food must be delivered to last until March. Yet the US is prepared to drop, at its own best estimate, barely one quarter of one day’s needs.

Some of these rations will, of course, be lost. Many, perhaps most, will be eaten by people who are not in immediate danger of starvation, as they are more mobile than the seriously hungry and better able to reach the packs. Some will remain untouched. One of the warring factions may discover that an effective means of eliminating its enemies is to remove the contents of these packs and replace them with explosives. This is just one of the problems associated with dispensing kindness at 20,000 feet: no one can be completely sure whose generosity they are about to enjoy.

The usefulness of any feeding programme, moreover, is greatly diminished if it is not carefully targetted. People in different stages of starvation require different preparations. Children, especially infants, are more vulnerable than any others. Yet all the packs being dropped on Afghanistan are identical, and all are equipped only to feed adults. The packs contain medicine as well as food, but unlike aid workers on the ground, the pilots delivering them can offer no diagnosis. This blanket prescription is likely to be either useless or dangerous.

So western governments have terminated what may have been an effective humanitarian programme, and replaced it with a futile gesture. The bombing raids, moreover, have persuaded thousands to flee from their homes. Yet Afghanistan’s borders remain closed, while the camps the UN is building in Pakistan will not be ready for another two weeks. The refugees have nowhere to go. The military strikes, the US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, would “create conditions for sustained … humanitarian relief operations in Afghanistan”. They have, so far, done precisely the opposite.

But the purpose of the food drops is not to feed the starving, but to tell them they are being fed. President Bush explained on Sunday that by means of these packages, “the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies”. They will know it, for they know that gestures will not feed them. Hunger brooks no tokenism. It demands food, not a semblance of food.

This show of generosity is, of course, designed to impress us as well as them. The yellow packages drifting onto the minefields of the Hindu Kush are likely to be the most, over the next few days, that we will see of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. The hungry will die quietly, on the forgotten trails through the mountains, huddled behind rocks, searching the streets of deserted cities, clawing for roots in the empty fields. The satellites which can count the shells stacked behind a howitzer cannot peer into the faces of the starving.

And if, somehow, a sensible humanitarian mission resumed, the linkage established by both Bush and Blair between aid and ordnance, which sounds so bold and compassionate at home, could turn out to be disastrous in Afghanistan. If the humanitarian programme continues to be perceived as part of the military offensive, we could expect the dispersed guerillas of a partly vanquished regime to slip into the feeding centres, to lob a few grenades into the crowd.

While it is not hard to predict how the humanitarian operation might end, it is rather more difficult to see how the military mission could be concluded. The Taliban have vowed to fight “to the last breath”. While many of their conscripts will desert, the hardcore are likely to do just this. They dispersed sometime before Sunday’s attacks. Their anti-aircraft guns, tanks and planes were peripheral to the operation of what has always, in effect, been a guerilla force. In confronting them, as Russian veterans have warned, we will be pummelling thin air. Donald Rumsfeld has defined “victory” as the Taliban’s “collapse from within”. But this is not victory, only the beginning of the next phase of war.

If, as Bush and Blair maintain, they aim to leave Afghanistan better than it was when they found it, then the West is committed to defend it against all oppressors, whoever they might be. This implies that if the Northern Alliance moves into the vaccuum left by the nominal defeat of the Taliban, and establishes not the “broad-based” government of assorted extremists the West envisages, but a narrow government of homogenous extremists, we must fight them too.

So at what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?

The consequences of this endless war may be dangerous for the West. They could be deadly for Afghanistan.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th September 2001

If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. For the past four years, his name has been invoked whenever a US president has sought to increase the defence budget or wriggle out of arms control treaties. He has been used to justify even President Bush’s missile defence programme, though neither he nor his associates are known to possess anything approaching ballistic missile technology. Now he has become the personification of evil required to launch a crusade for good; the face behind the faceless terror.

The closer you look, the weaker the case against bin Laden becomes. While the terrorists who inflicted Tuesday’s dreadful wound in the world may have been inspired by him, there is, as yet, no evidence that they were instructed by him. Bin Laden’s presumed guilt rests on the supposition that he is the sort of man who would have done it. But his culpability is irrelevant: his usefulness to western governments lies in his power to terrify. When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities.

By using bin Laden as an excuse for demanding new military spending, weapons manufacturers in America and Britain have enhanced his iconic status among the disgruntled. His influence, in other words, has been nurtured by the very industry which claims to possess the means of stamping him out. This is not the only way in which the new terrorism crisis has been exacerbated by corporate power.

The lax airport security which enabled the hijackers to smuggle weapons onto the planes was the result of corporate lobbying against the stricter controls the government had proposed. Some reports suggest that so many died in the south tower of the World Trade Centre partly because some of the companies there instructed their employees to return to work after the north tower had been hit.

Now Tuesday’s horror is being used by corporations to establish the preconditions for an even deadlier brand of terror. This week, while the world’s collective back is turned, Tony Blair intends to allow the mixed oxide plant at Sellafield to start operating. The decision would have been front page news at any other time. Now it’s likely to be all but invisible. The plant’s operation, long demanded by the nuclear industry and resisted by almost everyone else, will lead to a massive proliferation of plutonium, and a near certainty that some of it will find its way into the hands of terrorists. Like Ariel Sharon, in other words, Blair is using the reeling world’s shock to pursue policies which would be unacceptable at any other time.

For these reasons and many others, radical opposition has seldom been more necessary. But it has seldom been more vulnerable. The right is seizing the political space which has opened up where the twin towers of the World Trade Centre once stood.

Civil liberties are suddenly negotiable. The US seems prepared to lift its ban on extra-judicial executions carried out abroad by its own agents. The CIA might be permitted to employ human rights abusers once more, which will doubtless mean training and funding a whole new generation of bin Ladens. The British government is considering the introduction of identity cards. Radical dissenters in Britain have already been identified as terrorists by the Terrorism Act 2000. Now we’re likely to be treated as such.

One of the peculiar problems we radicals face is that the targets of Tuesday’s terror represented more clearly than any others the powers we have long opposed. For those of us who have campaigned against the predatory behaviour of the financial sector and the defence industry, the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon had come to symbolise all that was rotten in the state of the world. So, though ours is a movement built on peace, it has not been hard for our opponents to equate our dissidence with terror.

The authoritarianism which has long been lurking in advanced capitalism has started to surface. In the Guardian yesterday, William Shawcross — Rupert Murdoch’s courteous biographer — articulated the new orthodoxy: America is, he maintained, “a beacon of hope for the world’s poor and dispossessed and for all those who believe in freedom of thought and deed”. These believers would presumably include the families of the Iraqis killed by the sanctions Britain and the US have imposed; the peasants murdered by Bush’s proxy war in Colombia; and the tens of millions living under despotic regimes in the Middle East, sustained and sponsored by the United States.

William Shawcross concluded by suggesting that “we are all Americans now”, a terrifying echo of Pinochet’s maxim that “we are all Chileans now”: by which he meant that no cultural distinctions would be tolerated, and no indigenous land rights recognised. Shawcross appeared to suggest that those who question American power are now the enemies of democracy. It’s a different way of formulating the warning voiced by members of the Bush administration: “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”.

The Daily Telegraph has set aside part of its leader column for a directory of “useful idiots”, by which it means those who oppose major military intervention. Doubtless I will find my name on the roll of honour there tomorrow. So, perhaps, will the families of some of the victims, who seem to be rather more capable of restraint and forgiveness than the leader writers of the rightwing press. Mark Newton-Carter, whose brother appears to have died in the terrorist outrage, told one of the Sunday newspapers, “I think Bush should be caged at the moment. He is a loose cannon. He is building up his forces getting ready for a military strike. That is not the answer. Gandhi said: ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’ and never a truer word was spoken.” But when the right is on the rampage, victims as well as perpetrators are trampled.

Mark Twain once observed that “there are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it.” The radical left is able to state categorically that Tuesday’s terrorism was a dreadful act, irrespective of provenance. But the right can’t bring itself to make the same statement about Israel’s new invasions of Palestine, or the sanctions in Iraq, or the US-backed terror in East Timor, or the carpet bombing of Cambodia. Its critical faculties have long been suspended and now, it demands, we must suspend ours too.

Retaining the ability to discriminate between good acts and bad acts will become ever harder over the next few months, as new conflicts and paradoxes challenge our preconceptions. It may be that a convincing case against bin Laden is assembled, whereupon his forced extradition would be justified. But, unless we wish to help George Bush use barbarism to defend the “civilisation” he claims to represent, we on the left must distinguish between extradition and extermination.

Tuesday’s terror may have signalled the beginning of the end of globalisation. The recession it has doubtless helped to precipitate, coupled with a new and understandable fear among many Americans of engagement with the outside world, could lead to a reactionary protectionism in the United States, which is likely to provoke similar responses on this side of the Atlantic. We will, in these circumstances, have to be careful not to celebrate the demise of corporate globalisation, if it merely gives way to something even worse.

The governments of Britain and America are using the disaster in New York to reinforce the very policies which have helped to cause the problem: building up the power of the defence industry, preparing to launch campaigns of the kind which inevitably kill civilians, licensing covert action. Corporations are securing new resources to invest in instability. Racists are attacking Arabs and Muslims and blaming liberal asylum policies for terrorism. As a result of the horror on Tuesday, the right in all its forms is flourishing, and we are shrinking. But we must not be cowed. Dissent is most necessary just when it is hardest to voice.

George Monbiot’s book Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain is now published in paperback.