POLITICS: U.S. Moves Toward Strikes on ‘Terrorism in General’

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 14 2001 (IPS) - Two days after the most devastating terrorist attack in U.S. history, Washington appeared to be preparing the ground for a sustained military campaign against suspected Islamist groups, beginning with Afghanistan-based Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

Senior officials pledged that Washington would not respond, as in the past, with isolated attacks against a suspected group or individuals. Their intent, they stressed, is to conduct a much broader assault against terrorist organisations and governments which harbour them.

“It’s going to unfold over time,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. “One thing is clear: you don’t do it with just a single military strike, no matter how dramatic.”

While officials explicitly identified bin Laden as the prime suspect for Tuesday’s attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, Congress moved swiftly Thursday to increase the military budget and approve a resolution to give President George W. Bush broad authority to retaliate militarily.

A final resolution was expected to be agreed and approved Friday.

Bush and others, meanwhile, tied up overseas phone lines to mobilise foreign leaders in support of U.S. military action.

In an afternoon press conference, Secretary of State Colin Powell drew special attention to Washington’s success in persuading NATO Wednesday night to invoke the collective security provisions of its charter and the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution Thursday expressing its members’ readiness to respond to the Sep 11 attacks.

He also announced he would speak directly with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf late Thursday, adding that Washington has delivered a “specific list of things that we think would be useful for (the Pakistani government) to work on with us.”

Included on the list, according to knowledgeable sources, was a request for detailed intelligence information about Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime and permission to deploy U.S. special forces capable of striking into Afghanistan.

Pakistan is seen as critical to any action against bin Laden and the Taliban, which has refused Washington’s repeated requests to extradite him. Islamabad has acted as the Taliban’s closest ally and protector since the extreme Islamist movement swept from its bases in Peshawar, Pakistan, to the Afghan capital of Kabul more than six years ago.

Powell indicated Al Qaeda was the group considered most likely to be behind Tuesday’s attacks. “We haven’t yet publicly identified the organisation we believe was responsible,” he said. “But when you look at the list of candidates who have the kind of capacity that would have been necessary to conduct the attack, one resides in that region.” When asked whether he was referring to bin Laden’s group, Powell replied, “yes.”

With thousands of federal investigators working to establish the identities and associations of the suicide hijackers who crashed two commercial passenger jets into the twin World Trade Centre towers in New York, officials there announced that more than 4,700 people believed to have been in the towers at the time of their collapse were missing, presumed buried in the rubble.

If true, that would bring the total death toll from the four skyjackings to more than 5,000. The Defence Department estimated that 126 military and civilian personnel were killed in the Pentagon crash, while 266 passengers and crew perished in the four commandeered jets. Attorney-General John Ashcroft said Thursday investigators had determined that at least 18 terrorists took over the planes.

Such a toll, double the number of U.S. fatalities suffered in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which propelled the United States into World War II, has caused genuine shock throughout the nation and explains the war fever that has overtaken Washington and made a military response a virtual certainty.

Tuesday’s attacks appear not only to have abruptly ended the political bickering between Republicans and Democrats that dominated Washington until this week; they also appear to have transformed U.S. diplomacy, virtually overnight.

In contrast to the Bush administration’s much-noted unilateralist tendencies, multilateral diplomacy has suddenly taken centre stage as Washington works to knit together a “coalition” of countries willing to support military action with more than words.

Expressing gratification with personal expressions of support from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and others, Bush, in a brief television appearance, vowed to “lead the world to victory” against terrorism.

“A coalition is in the process of coming together,” explained Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, who led the coalition against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, during a speech to a business audience Thursday. The elder Bush described NATO’s invocation of Article Five of the Washington Treaty, which requires all alliance members to treat an attack against one as an attack against all, as “very, very important.”

Powell, who served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during the Gulf War, appeared to be taking a page from that chapter when he suggested to reporters that Washington was abandoning its relatively passive approach to the ongoing violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Noting that he had personally pressed both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Yassir Arafat by telephone Thursday afternoon to move decisively toward a ceasefire, he said he hoped that a first meeting leading to implementation of the long-stalled Mitchell Plan for a mutual reduction in tensions could take place “in the next several days.”

European and Arab allies have warned for weeks that Washington’s backing of Sharon’s preconditions for implementing the Mitchell Plan had brought U.S. popular standing in the region to an all- time low and was strengthening the appeal of radical forces, including bin Laden and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Powell suggested that both men might be targets of the impending campaign. At one point, he described Saddam Hussein as “one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth.”

Washington, he said, will now focus on assembling evidence, “in a way that the world will fully concur with us, who is responsible for (Tuesday’s attacks). At that point, we will go after that group, that network, and those who have harboured, supported and aided that network, to rip the network up. And when we’re through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general.”