Terrorism is served by the policies Bush and his Israeli allies
Whose culture of hatred?
Ayman El-Amir
"Why do they hate us" was the most perplexing question that gripped Americans in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks seven years ago. The groping for answers did not take long as the Halliburton- Bush administration produced its own hasty response. It launched a carpet-bombing campaign of Afghanistan from end to end, ousted the backward rule of the Taliban, chased Al-Qaeda's leaders and operatives and adopted in September 2002 the Bush doctrine of hot pursuit and pre-emptive strikes against suspected terrorist targets. Billions of US dollars and tens of thousands of brains and hardware were poured into the global war on terror. It forestalled some plots but failed to prevent others in London, Madrid and North Africa.
The Halliburton-instigated invasion of Iraq then shifted the focus and relegated the "Why do they hate us" question to the background of the short American memory. One of the versions concocted by the Halliburton-Bush administration to sell the Iraqi war was to fight the terrorist coalition of Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. All evidence belied the notion of any possible connection. Instead of serving as the landmark in stamping out terrorism, Iraq itself became a hotbed of terrorism. It turned into a jihadist's dream of crushing "the infidels", a freedom fighter's dream of evicting the conquerors, and a multifarious sectarian dream of settling old scores. The relative drop in attacks and number of casualties the US command structure is now flaunting to justify the reduction of occupation forces is misleading: divided Iraq is not turning into a peaceful country and will not be so for a long time to come.
The US-led global war on terror is faring even worse in Afghanistan where NATO troops are fighting desperate battles against a resurgent Taliban. The lessons of past British occupation and Soviet conquest remain unlearned. And NATO generals are experiencing self-doubts that the war against terror in Afghanistan can ever be won. A US analyst once compared trying to crush Al-Qaeda to smashing a ball of mercury with a sledgehammer. All that happens is that it breaks up into a myriad of smaller balls each having the same chemical elements of the original ball. After seven years of Bush's global war, terrorism has mushroomed, the world is not a safer place to live in and the agonising question of "Why do they hate us" still persists. The UN's experience in tackling the problem may be relevant here.
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