A Fresh take perhaps? (Score 1)

This is a text transcript of Alexander Cockburn's talk on AM Live on 26 September 2001. What did move those kamikaze Muslims to embark, some many months ago or even years, on the training that they knew would culminate in their deaths as well of those (they must have hoped) of thousands upon thousands of innocent people? Was it the Koran plus a tape from Osama bin Laden? The dream of a world in which all men wear untrimmed beards and women have to stay at home or go outside only when enveloped in blue tents? I doubt it. If I had to cite or tell people what might have steeled the resolve of those kamikaze Muslims, surely it would have included the exchange on CBS (the American Network) in 1996 between Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Lesley Stahl, a reporter with CBS. Albright was maintaining that sanctions on Iraq had yielded important concessions from Saddam Hussein and then Leslie Stahl asked her this question: "We have heard that half a million children have died, I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?" And Albright answered "I think this is a very hard choice, we think the price is worth it." That exchange became famous all over the Middle East. I'll bet the Sept. 11 kamikazes knew it well enough, just as they could tell you the crimes wrought against the Palestinians. So would it be unfair today to take Madeleine Albright down to the ruins of the Trade Towers, remind her of what she said at that time and point out that the price turned out to include that awful mortuary as well? Was that price worth it too, Mrs. Albright? Mere nitpicking among the ruins and the dust of the 6500 people? I don't think so. America has led a charmed life amid its wars on people. The wars mostly didn't come home and the press made as sure as it could that folks, including the ordinary workers in the Trade Towers, weren't really up to speed on what was being wrought in Freedom's name (Freedom as George Bush frequently invokes it). In Freedom's name America made sure that any possibility of secular democratic reform in the Middle East was shut off. Mount a coup against Mossadegh as they did in the mid-1950s, and you end up with the Ayatollah Khomeni 25 years later. Mount a coup against Kassim in Iraq, as the CIA did, and you get the agency's man, Saddam Hussein. What about Afghanistan? In April of 1978 an indigenous populist coup overthrew the government of Mohammed Daoud, a dictator who had formed an alliance with the Shah of Iran. The new Afghan government was led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, and the Taraki administration embarked on land reform, hence an attack on the opium-growing feudal estates. Taraki, a leftist, communist probably, went to the UN, where he managed to raise loans for crop substitution for the poppy fields. Taraki also tried to bear down on opium production in the border areas of Afganistan held by fundamentalists - the mujahideen, since the latter were using opium revenues to finance attacks on Afghanistan's central government, which they regarded as an unwholesome incarnation of modernity that allowed women to go to school and outlawed arranged marriages and the bride price. At that time the mujahideen were not only getting money from the CIA but from Qaddafi in fact, who sent them $250,000. In the summer of 1979 (now listen carefully to this one) the U.S. State Dept. produced a memo making it clear how the U.S. government saw the stakes, no matter how modern-minded Taraki might be or how feudal the mujahideen. "The United States' larger interest...would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever set backs this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviets' view of the socialist course of history being inevitable is not accurate." Taraki was killed by Afghan army officers in September 1979. Hafizullah Amin, educated in the U.S., took over and began meeting regularly with U.S. embassy officials at a time when the U.S. was arming Islamic rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, U.S.-backed regime in Afghanistan, the Soviets invaded in force in December 1979. Well, the typists and messenger boys and back office staffs throughout the Trade Center - ordinary working people didn't know that history. How could those people in the Towers have known, when U.S. political and journalistic culture is a conspiracy to perpetuate their ignorance? Those people in the Trade Towers were innocent portions of the price that-Albright insisted-in just one of its applications as being worth it. It would honor their memory to demand that in the future our press offers a better accounting of how America's wars for Freedom are fought, and what the actual price might include. The above is a text transcript of Alexander Cockburn's talk on AM Live on 26 September 2001.