Palestine Papers Index | Sonoma County Free Press Home Page

11/2001

A southeast Asian monkey trap is constructed from a hollow gourd with a single opening just large enough for the monkey's hand to grasp the tempting bait of fruit. Finding the bait, the monkey also finds that it cannot remove both its hand and the fruit. The trap works because the monkey refuses to let go of the fruit even as disaster approcahes. In the same fashion, the government of the United States now refuses to release the fruit of avarice and revenge, even as disaster befalls with, certainly, more disaster to come.

The brilliant British author John LeCarre, in the October 13th The Toronto Globe and Mail tell us "We have already lost. What victory can we possibly achieve that matches the defeats we have already suffered, let alone the defeats that lie ahead?"

Le Carre wonders how it will end. "How about with Osama bin Laden in chains, looking more serene and Christ-like than ever, arranged before a tribune of his vanquishers with Johnny Cochran to defend him?"

"Or how about with Osama bin Laden blown to smithereens by one of those clever bombs we keep reading about that kill terrorists in caves but don't break the crockery? Or is there a solution I haven't thought of that will prevent us from turning our archenemy into an arch martyr in the eyes of those for whom he is already semi-divine?"

"Unfortunately," LeCarre continues, "what America longs for at this moment, even above retribution, is more friends and fewer enemies. And what America is storing up for herself, and so are we Brits; is yet more enemies. Because after all the bribes, threats and promises that have patched together this rickety coalition, we cannot prevent another suicide bomber being born each time a misdirected missile wipes out an innocent village, and. nobody can tell us how to dodge this devil's cycle, of despair, hatred and-yet again-revenge."

"By the accepted rules of terrorist engagement, of course, the war is long lost. By us. What victory can we possibly achieve that matches the defeats we have already suffered, let alone the defeats that lie ahead? "Terror is theatre," a soft-spoken Palestinian firebrand told me in Beirut in 1982. The late Mikhail Bakunin, evangelist of anarchism, liked to speak of the Propaganda of the Act. It's hard to imagine more theatrical, more potent acts of propaganda than these."

"Now Mr. Bakunin in his grave and Mr. bin Laden in his cave must be rubbing their hands in glee as we embark on the very process that terrorists of their stamp so relish: as we hastily double up our police and intelligence forces and award them greater powers, as we put basic civil liberties on hold and curtail press freedom, impose news blackouts and secret censorship, spy on ourselves and, at our worst, violate mosques and hound luckless citizens in our streets because we are afraid of the colour of their skin."

"All the fears that we share - Dare I fly? Ought I to tell the police about the weird couple upstairs? Would it be safer not to drive down Whitehall this morning? Is my child safely back from school? Have my life's savings plummeted? - are precisely the fears our attackers want us to have."

The author of 18 novels, including his most recent, The Constant Gardener, John LeCarre wrote this before the recent revelations of anthrax threat.