the state itself. He insists that to understand political violence is not to justify it,
and that to identify political violence simply with the fanaticism of individuals is
superficial.
Zinn warns that there is a reservoir of possible practitioners of political violence
among all those people in the world who have suffered as a result of US foreign
policy (2002: 17). Not only can a policy of political violence against political
violence be counterproductive, but it can also heighten inequalities at home and
abroad. The infant mortality rate in the USA is one of the worst in the world and
now it is likely to increase (Zinn, 2002: 19). The sum of $350 billion is spent on
being a military superpower; yet $101 billion could save eight million lives in the
poorer countries of the world (2002: 18). War ravages civil liberties: even in 1979,
it was argued that part of the cost of protecting the public against violence is the
reduction of individual rights in a free society (Friedlander, 1979: 234). But the
American public sees anyone who looks Middle Eastern, Arab or Muslim as
potentially violent. War undermines the pursuit of truth, and encourages domestic
imitators. McVeigh, who was a veteran of the Gulf War, described the children he
killed in the Oklahoma bombing as ‘collateral damage’, while the factory bombed
in the Sudan on the orders of President Clinton, produced not nerve gas but
pharmaceuticals (Zinn, 2002: 21).Chapter 20 Political violence 461Political violence and 9/11
James Hamill, in an analysis of the Iraq War, comments that an animosity has been consolidated
that may contain within it the seeds of a future political violence (2003a: 326). The ideological
right, he argues, had long held the view that overwhelming force should be deployed regardless
of international legal norms, and September 11th legitimised these ideas. They were expressed
in a document in September 2002 outlining national strategy, and although attempts to establish
a link between Iraq and Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda were ‘unsuccessful’, the policy of dismantling
weapons of mass destruction via regime change was pressed (2003a: 328). Iraq provided the
old-fashioned inter-state conflict that made the ‘war against political violence’ more concrete
and tangible. This strategy document was seen as embodying a ‘Bush doctrine’ of comparable
importance to the ‘Truman doctrine’ of 1947 that sought ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union
(Kurth, 2002: 404).
Dr Hans Blix, former head of the UN Monitoring Commission, attacked the USA and Britain
for planning the war well in advance and contended that they were fabricating evidence against
Iraq to legitimise the campaign (Hamill, 2003a: 330). Hamill provides a detailed argument to
show that the armed action was in defiance of the UN Charter, and describes the action as ‘a
war in search of a pretext’ (2003b: 9). Hamill’s fear is that the launching of an illegal war will
foster a climate in which more young people throughout the Arab world will become receptive
to the crude anti-Western rhetoric of violent groups (2003b: 100). It will increase rather than
diminish the impact of Bin Laden-style extremism, and encourage states to accelerate their own
programmes to develop nuclear capability (2003b: 11–13).
Focus