“Terrorism: The Greater Threat Lies Within”
by
Rev. William E. Alberts



The greatest threat to the security of the United States is not terrorism from without but an attitude of superiority from within. Our country is in danger of becoming a super nation. God is being replaced by—or serving as an accomplice to—a global “war on terrorism,” begun as a “crusade” and heralded as “Operation Infinite Justice,” “a war,” we are told, “to save the world” by ridding it of “evildoers.” This attitude of superiority was expressed by President Bush in his weekly radio address on September 22, 2001 in response to the horrific atrocities of September 11: “I want to remind the people of America, we’re still the greatest nation on the face of the Earth, and no terrorist will ever be able to decide our fate. May God bless you all.” The President reveals an attitude that itself could “decide our fate.”
The atrocities of September 11 offered us citizens the opportunity to engage in serious self-examination about our country’s foreign policy and whether it may have contributed to such violent aggression. But “the greatest nation on the face of the Earth” has defended against any national soul searching. Instead of introspection, we got knee-jerk, flag-waving, distraction-inducing patriotism—with periodic observances of the
carnage of September 11 that keep our attention fixed on “ground zero,” wherein there is
*Dr. William E. Alberts is hospital chaplain at Boston Medical Center. Both a Unitarian Universalist minister and United Methodist minister, he received his Ph.D. from Boston University in the field of psychology and pastoral counseling. His numerous essays and articles on racism and politics and religion have appeared in newspapers, magazines and journals, with research reports on mainstream print media’s coverage of issues of race and racism published by the William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston and by Sage race relations abstracts, London, UK.

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no room for scrutiny of our government’s foreign policy in our name. Perhaps underlying any resistance to national self-examination in the wake of September 11 is a fear of discovering far greater atrocities committed in our name.
Such an atrocity is our country’s ongoing genocidal policy against Iraq, which apparently is the next target of America’s so-called “war on terrorism.” A Boston Globe editorial reports President Bush as stating, “the ‘one thing I will not allow is a nation such as Iraq to threaten our very future by developing weapons of mass destruction.’” (Mar. 15, 2002). The editorial itself adds, “In reality [italics added], Saddam already has large quantities of chemical and biological weapons.”
The Boston Globe assumes to know Iraq’s “reality”: A more recent editorial repeatedly cites “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction,” emphasizes the threat he poses with them, also warns that he “is closer than ever to developing nuclear weapons after nearly four years without UN weapons inspectors working in Iraq,” and states that “Bush is justified in authorizing covert action to topple Saddam as reported by Bob Woodward in The Washington Post”—the justification for which is “to help liberate Iraq from Saddam’s republic of fear” and establish “a decent democratic government.” (June 19, 2002) Evidently Republican and Democratic leaders alike also know Iraq’s “reality,” as they “voiced support yesterday for expanded administration plans to topple Saddam Hussein,” which includes preemptive military action against Iraq—or any other regime perceived as “a threat to the United States.” (The Boston Globe, June 17, 2002)
“In reality?” In a May 21, 2002 speech at The Community Church of Boston, Scott Ritter, a former senior UN weapons inspector for Iraq, from 1991 to 1998, stated
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there is no credible evidence that Iraq has any chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. In an October 12, 2001 Los Angeles Times op ed page piece, Ritter wrote that the “legitimate concern about the status of the United Nations’ efforts to account for all Iraq’s weapons programs … must be tempered by the reality [italics added] that most of Iraq’s biological agents, along with its production facilities, have been destroyed.” Ritter concludes, “With its military poorly trained and equipped, its economy in tatters and once-vaunted weapons of mass destruction largely dismantled by UN weapons inspectors, Iraq today represents a threat to no one.”
“In reality?” The United States-controlled UN Security Council imposed complete economic sanctions against Iraq in August of 1990, supposedly in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The United States then took only 42 days to bomb Iraq into submission—intentionally destroying and damaging the country’s life-support systems (dams, water-pumping stations, municipal water and sewage facilities, food processing plants and warehouses, farm herds, municipal buildings and so much more), which served to intensify the hardship imposed by the sanctions. On August 12, 1999, UNICEF reported on the devastation caused by the sanctions: “If the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.” (For a penetrating analysis of “the devastation of Iraq by war and sanctions,” see Ramsey Clark’s essay
called “Fire and Ice” in Challenge to Genocide: Let Iraq Live, International Action Center, New York, 1998.)
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“In reality?” On May 12, 1996, when “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl told then United States Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, “We have heard that a half million children have died” and asked, “Is this price worth it?,” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it” [italics added]. Albright added that “the UN will say the sanctions have been successful. He [Saddam Hussein] is not going to invade another country.”
“In reality?” Now, twelve sanction-imposed years later, the death toll of Iraqi children and adults continues to mount and Saddam Hussein has not invaded another country. Nor has he relented and disclosed any hidden chemical and biological weapons, or unleashed them on any country or American city—if he has any stockpile and the capability to unleash them, which, if he did, would be to commit national suicide, given America’s own nuclear arsenal is far bigger than all the other countries put together. Nor have the suffering Iraqi people risen up and toppled his government if that were the purpose of the sanctions. The “60 Minutes” program, called “Punishing Saddam,” reported that the Iraqi people blame the United States and not Saddam Hussein for the sanctions and the genocide-like suffering and deaths they are causing. In reality, the United States-controlled sanctions themselves are a continuing, silent, insidious weapon of mass destruction. They are a perversion of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you fear they will do unto you—because of what you have done unto them. It is the roots of the fear that need to be examined and addressed. The sanctions are a source of rage to
seethe and grow and turn into a powder-keg of hatred and explode in the faces of Americans.
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The demonizing of Saddam Hussein appears to be in full swing, serving to gain public support for a war against the people of Iraq, to divert attention from the genocide in Iraq caused by the sanctions, and to justify the violation of Iraq’s national sovereignty. A Boston Globe editorial, entitled “SADDAM’S IRAQI VICTIMS,” recalls Saddam Hussein’s “genocidal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s” that resulted in the deaths of “50,000 to 180,000” Kurds. The editorial states that “mass murderers,” like Saddam Hussein, “have many collaborators,” such as Arab leaders if they “keep their shameful silence about Saddam’s genocidal regime.” (Mar. 25, 2002) Omitted from the editorial are two apparent “collaborators” close to home: the United States and the United Kingdom who were friends and allies of Saddam Hussein throughout the time of his atrocities against the Kurds.
It would appear that the responsibility to assess United States foreign policy on our behalf is not being adequately fulfilled by mainstream print media. A Washington Post editorial called “A Coalition for Iraq” asserts that “the United States can, and should, create a consensus [among Arab governments in the Middle East] over the course of the next few months for freeing Iraqis [italics added] from the Saddam Hussein
dictatorship” (Mar. 24, 2002). Similarly, A Boston Globe editorial entitled “ONE AT A TIME” ends with, “The administration should finish dismantling Al Qaeda before turning to Saddam, but it should also continue to prepare for the day when US power will be used
to keep America’s tragically unfulfilled promise to liberate Iraqis [italics added] from their despised dictator” (Jan. 8, 2002).

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In reality Iraq needs to be liberated from United States foreign policy. What the children of Iraq and their families have needed for years is not cluster bombs but sanction-denying parts for incubators to work, not air raids but ambulances, not guns but gauze, not anti-ballistic missiles but antibiotics, not military force but medical help, not sanctions but Americans who are “fair” and “compassionate” and “generous,” not an attitude of superiority but of commonality.
America’s fate is in danger of being decided not by “terrorists” but by an attitude of superiority. This is an attitude that repeatedly proclaims the value of and America’s friendship for Muslim people, while paying $1,000 compensation to families for each innocent Afghanistan civilian proved to be “mistakenly” killed by United States bombing. While naturally denied often by the Bush Administration, it is easier for “the greatest nation on the face of the earth” to wage war against persons who don’t look like people sampled in public opinion polls or believe as they do.
This attitude of superiority imposes an equality between tanks and slingshots: thus it finances and supports Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestinians’ land, and puts the onus on the oppressed to reduce the escalating violence. It then tells the oppressed to
get rid of their democratically-elected leader and elect “new and different Palestinian leadership . . . not compromised by terror,” and “build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty” [italics added] for “America and the world” to “actively support their efforts” for “independence.” [from transcript of President Bush’s speech on his
Middle East proposals, The New York Times, June 25, 2002]. These are the words of the so-called “leader of the free world,” who lost the popular vote and was installed as
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president by a Republican-favored US Supreme Court—in collusion with highly partisan Florida election authorities, whose manipulation of the outcome included disfranchising thousands of voters, especially Black Americans. The Palestinians already have a democratically-elected leader. We do not. The arrogance and obliviousness of unreflective power. This attitude’s subtle reinterpretation of reality is seen in a New York Times editorial, on President Bush’s latest Middle East proposals, which refers to “the strain of Palestinian terror and Israeli military retaliation.” (June 25, 2002)
This attitude of superiority has virtue and rightness built-in to protect against the invasion of any conflicting outside reality that might prove it wrong and liable. We are constantly told “the terrorists hate us for our freedom and democracy,” and not for any conceivable transgression of United States foreign policy. The very use of the words “terrorists,” “evildoers” and “axis of evil” deifies the user and demonizes those so labeled, discredits the opposition and diverts attention from any injustices of those in power. Thus “a war between good and evil,” led by a president who has “made it clear to the world that we will stand strong on the side of good [italics added], and we expect other nations to join us” (The Boston Globe, Oct. 5, 2001).
America’s fate will be decided by the extent to which we allow the horror of September 11 to engage us in self-examination not self-righteousness. Our country’s security will not be safeguarded by denial but by the demand for truth, not by national arrogance but a foreign policy that recognizes the inalienable rights of all people. In
reality, America’s fate depends on our capacity to experience other people’s reality not interpret it.