The London Blasts: Media Review

DAY 43: 19 August 2005

REALISM UPDATE

JNV has tried to track the debate in the British media over whether or not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are connected to the heightened risk of terrorism in the UK.

After a long hiatus, there are signs of this debate re-emerging.

One interesting initiative, which should be supported, is the attempt by the Muslim Council of Britain to get the issue of foreign policy onto the agenda:

'Britain's leading Muslim organisation has ordered an internal investigation into the role of mosques amid pressure from the government to help tackle radical extremism in Muslim communities.'

'The Muslim Council of Britain has also set up committees to examine the role of women and young people in Islamic society.'

'The move by the MCB coincides with a list drawn up by the Home Office of seven areas it wants Muslim communities to address. As well as the role of mosques and ways of engaging women and young people, the list includes how communities can help tackle extremism, and concerns about security, Islamophobia and community policing.'

'Although that list meets with MCB approval, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, its secretary-general, has written to Hazel Blears, Home Office minister, asking for two additions - the effects of UK foreign policy on Muslims and the role of the media.' (FT, page 2)

In another extraordinary departure, we have the first serious discussion of the Home Office/Foreign Office report Young Muslims and Extremism - by Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian.

Both definitely deserve follow up letters. Email addresses for the papers are here.

HIROSHIMA / NAGASAKI

Starting from the failure of Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to apologise for the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes (there are more revelations today in all the British papers), Matthew Norman of the Independent goes on to consider other cases of the dictum that, 'Power means never having to say sorry'.

He refers to the sixtieth anniversary of the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Perhaps you expect some reference to the failure of the United States to apologise for the mass killing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or perhaps to the fact that the Japanese government has just repeated its apology to the victims of Japanese aggression during that war?

No, Norman breezes past these relevant matters and presents us with the following sentence:

'On this 60th anniversary of the Japanese surrender, Sir Ian cannot bring himself even to go as far as Hirohito, and admit that the attempt to apprehend Mr de Menezes developed not necessarily to the Met's advantage.'

There is no mention of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Today, in The Times, in response to a vigorous debate on the atomic bombings, Bruce Kent of CND points out that the CND view was also held by senior US officials:

'Field Marshal Montgomery, General Eisenhower and President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, all took much the same view. In his wartime memoirs, I Was There, Leahy wrote:

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan . . . In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."

'Had the Allies at Potsdam assured the Japanese that the position of the Emperor would be safeguarded in any postwar settlement, or had we encouraged the Soviets to enter the Pacific war earlier, there would have been no question of a ground invasion of Japan.'

The Telegraph columnnist Sam Leith made some apposite comments on 8 August:

What continues to astonish me is that there is a "debate" at all. And, indeed, that the way we talk about our history has, anniversaries aside, consigned the bombings to a sort of footnote - a historical curiosity over which a cool, academic discussion can be undertaken; a civilised counterfactual parlour game in which what-ifs are weighed up against what-happeneds, and Truman remains a "controversial" figure who took "difficult" decisions.

Of course I, like anyone of the generations born after these events happened, have no experience of the wars that preceded the bombing of Hiroshima. We had the luxury of peace. But I don't believe that precludes us from taking a view.

A thought experiment: what if we'd done it with soldiers? That is, what if we'd said: we need to bring this war to an end at all costs. And the way we'd chosen to do so was to capture a major city, pull its buildings down brick by brick, go through killing more than a hundred thousand of its non-combatant men, women and children, burning and maiming and poisoning countless others, and systematically sowing its soil with poison. And then, a few days later, did it to another city for good measure. I can't see how, morally, it all becomes any less abhorrent when you do it at the flick of a switch.

The relevance of all this to this column? The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are constantly invoked by Osama bin Laden and those he inspires as revealing the true standard of Western civilization.

BIN LADEN AND HIROSHIMA

Mas’ood Cajee, a member of the US Fellowship of Reconciliation National Council and a board member of the Muslim Peace Fellowship, wrote at the end of 2001:

Gillette-rejecting Osama Bin Laden knows he can't find sound justification in Islam for suicide, incineration, mass murder, hijacking, and other heinous crimes, but he is not particularly concerned. At first he denies involvement in the brilliant spectacle of death on September 11th, televised live from Tulsa to Timbuktu. Then he puts forth a justification that eerily echoes Harry Truman and references Madeleine Albright, because there is no Qur'anic justification for such terror.

"When people at the ends of the earth, Japan, were killed by their hundreds of thousands, young and old," Bin Laden told the world on the Sunday the bombing of Afghanistan began, "it was not considered a war crime, it is something that has justification. Millions of children in Iraq is something that has justification." [Guardian translation here]

In a broadcast that aired on May 12, 1996, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Albright: "We have heard that a half a million children have died [in Iraq]. I mean, that's more children than died when–in–in Hiroshima. And–and, you know, is the price worth it?"

"I think this is a very hard choice," Albright replied, "but the price–we think the price is worth it."

For Bin Laden, September 11 was not so much Pearl Harbor as his own personal Hiroshima, justified in his mind using the moral logic of realpolitik, not that of the Prophet Muhammad. The New York Times (October 14, 2001) reports that the CIA caught a cryptic but chilling message last year from a member of al-Qaeda, who boasted that Osama bin Laden was planning to carry out a Hiroshima against America. So he doesn't view September 11 as the opening volley of a war, but as a vengeful, shocking and stunning strike against the enemy in an ongoing war.

Bin Laden believes that Hiroshima points the way forward for the forces he leads.

Writing in the Washington Post, on 6 August 2005, Steve Coll remarks,

Since the late 1980s and certainly since 1991, bin Laden has seen the United States as the principal invader of the Muslim world because of its support for the Saudi royal family, Israel and other Middle Eastern governments he labels apostate. In often tedious debates with comrades during the 1990s, he has argued that only by attacking distant America could al Qaeda hope to mortally wound the Middle East's frontline authoritarian governments.

His inspiration, repeatedly cited in his writings and interviews, is the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he says shocked Japan's fading imperial government into a surrender it might not otherwise have contemplated. Bin Laden has said several times that he is seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons not only because it is God's will, but because he wants to do to American foreign policy what the United States did to Japanese imperial surrender policy.

As has been pointed out by others, including blogger Adam Young, those who continue to claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the cause of the Japanese surrender, and that they were morally justified, bolster both bin Laden's strategic and moral argument.

THE OTHER HIROSHIMA

Please notice also bin Laden's reference to the devastation caused by the economic sanctions on Iraq as another US crime on the scale of Hiroshima. Alain Gresh of Le Monde diplomatique has a column today in the Guardian pointing out that the real oil-for-food scandal was the 'deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.'

JNV welcomes feedback.