... And Peace
By HOWARD ZINN
(Howard Zinn is the author of "The People's History of the United States."

BOSTON -- How can we possibly turn from the heartbreaking images of last
week's disaster, and the emotions evoked in us, to thinking calmly about
terrorism and what to do about it?

Horrified and sickened as I was by what happened, I was again horrified and
sickened by the statements of our national political leaders as they
appeared on television and spoke of retaliation, of vengeance, of
punishment. We are at war, they said. And I thought: They have learned
nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the 20th century, from a
hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism
and counterterrorism, of violence met with violence in an unending cycle of
stupidity.

We can all feel a terrible anger at those who killed thousands of innocent
people in the insane belief it would help their cause. But what do we do
with that anger? Do we react with panic, strike out violently and blindly
just to show how tough we are? "We shall make no distinction," the
President proclaimed, between terrorists and countries that harbor
terrorists." Will we now bomb Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent
people? It is in the nature of bombing (and I say this as a former Air
Force bombardier) to be indiscriminate, to "make no distinction." Will we
then be committing terrorism in order to "send a message" to terrorists?

You hear politicians and military people saying there will be regrettable
but necessary "collateral damage." They used that same term in describing
the deaths of civilians in U.S. bombings of various countries, whether Iraq
or Panama or Yugoslavia.

When Timothy J. McVeigh defended his bombing of the federal building in
Oklahoma City, leaving 168 people dead, he too used the term "collateral
damage," remembering no doubt, how it was used in the Persian Gulf War,
where he served. My "Webster's Collegiate Dictionary" defines "collateral"
as "accompanying or related, but secondary or subordinate." Both McVeigh
and the leaders of our government have considered the toll of human life
secondary to whatever else was destroyed, and therefore acceptable.

When McVeigh was executed, the Boston Herald ran a huge headline that read
"It's Over." But we know now how wrong that was. It was not over. And it
will not be over until we stop concentrating on punishment and retaliation
and think calmly and intelligently about what to do about terrorism.

History can be useful, and there is a history of terrorism and reactions to
it. We have answered terrorist acts with force again and again. It is the
old way of thinking, the old way of acting. It has never worked.

Former President Reagan bombed Libya after a terrorist action in a
discotheque in Germany. The bombs were never intended to strike "the actual
terrorists:" Indeed, it was never clear who the terrorists were. But the
bombs did kill a number of people, including Moammar Kadafi's adopted
3-year-old daughter. Former President Clinton, after the bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, sent 75 cruise missiles (each a
weapon of mass destruction) to hit a presumed training camp in Afghanistan
and what was described as a chemical weapons manufacturing plant in the
Sudan. It turned out that the factory in the Sudan was not that at all, but
a pharmaceutical plant, and that its destruction deprived huge numbers of
Sudanese of medicines they needed.

The claim, in all of these bombings was that we had to "send a message" to
terrorists. And then comes this horror in New York and Washington. Isn't it
clear by now that sending "a message" to terrorists through violence
doesn't work, that it only leads to more terrorism? And isn't it the
terrorists themselves who explain their awful deeds by saying they need to
send a message to the world?

Haven't we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Car
bombs planted by Palestinians bring air attacks and tanks by the Israeli
government. That has been going on for years. It doesn't work. And innocent
people die on both sides.

We need new ways of thinking. We need to think about the resentment all
over the world felt by people who have been the victims of American
military action. In Vietnam, where we carried out terrorizing bombing
attacks, using napalm and cluster bombs, on peasant villages. In Latin
America, where we supported dictators and death squads in Chile and El
Salvador and other countries. In Iraq, where a million people have died as
a result of our economic sanctions. We need to pull back from our
overbearing posture astride the globe, with military bases in nineteen
countries, with our warships on every sea. Our presence in Saudi Arabia is
a particular provocation to Osama bin Laden, but also to other Saudi
nationalists. We supply Israel with high-tech weapons, while in the West
Bank and Gaza over a million and more Palestinians live under a cruel
military occupation.

We should remind ourselves that the awful scenes of death and suffering we
are now witnessing on our television screens have been endured by people in
other parts of the world for a long time, and often as a result of our
nation's policies. We can now imagine their fear, because of the fear we
are all experiencing for ourselves and our children. We need to understand
how some of those people will go beyond fear and anger to acts of terrorism.

Our own fear will remain until we begin to think differently about what
constitutes real security. A $300 billion dollar military budget has not
given us security. Military bases all over the world, our warships on every
ocean, have not given us security. Land mines, a "national missile defense
shield," will not give us security. We need to rethink our position in the
world. We need to stop sending weapons to countries that oppress other
people or their own people.

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured
up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always
indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is
terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

Yes, we can tend to immediate security needs. Let's take some of the
billions allocated for "missile defense," totally useless against terrorist
attacks such as this one, and pay the security people at airports decent
wages, give them intensive training, hire marshals to be on every flight.
But ultimately, there is no certain security against the unpredictable.

True, we can find Bin Laden, if he was indeed the perpetrator of last
week's tragedy, and punish him. But that will not end terrorism so long as
the pent-up grievances of decades, felt in so many countries of the Third
World, remain unattended.

We cannot be secure so long as we use our national wealth, for guns,
planes, bombs and nuclear weapons to maintain our position as a military
superpower. We should use that wealth instead to deal with poverty and
sickness in other parts of the world where desperation breeds resentment.
We need to become an economic and social superpower.

Here at home, our true security cannot come from putting the nation on a
war footing, with the accompanying threats to civil liberties that this
brings. It can only come from using our resources to make us the model of a
good society, prosperous and peacemaking, with free, universal medical
care, education and housing, guaranteed decent wages and a clean
environment for all.

We should take our example not from our military and political leaders
shouting "retaliate" and "war" but from the doctors and nurses and medical
students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst
of mayhem, whose first thoughts are not vengeance but compassion, not
violence but healing.
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(c) Los Angeles Times
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