Politics

At times like these, we would be churlish to forget how much we have to thank Americans for. Apart from anything else, they have enriched the language with the enviable expressions and patentable phrases that other English speakers, even when they are irritated, still imitate. American English is usually empowered by both oral and moral certitude, even more so in wartime. ‘History,’ says President George W. Bush portentously, ‘has called us into action.’ ‘The good guys are us,’ General Tommy Franks memorably declares just before the invasion of Iraq, warning President Bush: ‘We’re going to be suboptimised.’ Donald Rumsfeld says his bombers aren’t running out of targets, Afghanistan is. He doesn’t want diplomacy to divert the US from the coming war, so his plan is ‘to dribble this out slowly’. Vice-President Cheney assures the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar: ‘Once we start, Saddam is toast.’ Then, as the troops go in, ‘Just keep praying’, Condoleeza Rice urges her colleagues. ‘Mission accomplished’, the banner reads on 1 May 2003, on board the Abraham Lincoln. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we got ’im,’ Paul Bremer hubristically tells the press after the capture of Saddam Hussein. But what CIA Director George Tenet calls ‘the price of being wrong’ is rising.

It is hard to avoid the assessment that the most visible product to date of the war on terrorism has been nothing much more, or less, than more war and more terror. The unhappy reality since September 11 seems to be that all our major cities, and concentrations of Westerners anywhere, are as vulnerable as ever; the capacity of terrorist actors to do harm is as great as ever; their motivations are as great as ever; their identity is as elusive as ever; international cooperation is as fragile as ever; and international policy priorities are as misplaced as ever.

In Iraq, where the terrorist connection was the least plausible of all the reasons for going to war, terrorist violence has now become the most harrowing of all its consequences. The significance of Richard Clarke’s evidence to the September 11 Commission is not what the former anti-terrorism chief had to say, with all the wisdom that hindsight confers, about the failure of either Republican or Democrat administrations to take more effective action before September 11; rather, it is about the decision after September 11 to attack Iraq, a country that had about as much to do with it as Mexico, creating in the process the most expensive recruitment campaign for Islamist extremism ever launched.

Lam Khi Try is a Cambodian journalist who wrote articles exposing corruption, illegal logging and political assassinations by the Cambodian government. He received a threatening letter from the Cambodian prime minister and death threats from anonymous callers. After the director at Lam’s newspaper died in suspicious circumstances, the staff became frightened and the newspaper was closed. Lam was followed constantly, and he and his family went into hiding. Later, he fled Cambodia and came to Australia for refuge, followed by his wife Nary. They left their children in the care of relatives, with the intention of bringing them safely to Australia.

Asiye Guzel Zeybek – a Turkish journalist, editor and author of Rape under Torture (1999) and Our Cakir: The Life of a Revolutionary (2001) – was arrested on 27 February 1997, together with nineteen other colleagues. Zeybek, now thirty-three years old, is an executive board member of the Istanbul Branch of the Progressive Journalists’ Association, and also editor-in-chief of Atilin. She was specifically accused under Article 168 of the Turkish Penal Code, and subsequently convicted for her association with the now banned Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. Zeybek’s legal counsel staunchly rebutted the prosecutor’s allegations of her involvement in any violence.