JORGE MAJFUDBy sea and by air, and nothing more20 years since the only 9/11 that matters

Jorge Majfud, 6/9/2021
Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, has gone and done it again. In a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, he insisted that “we need some ‘boots on the ground’” to fight against terrorism. Of course, this terrorism did not come out of nowhere; rather, it emerged from the historic interventions of the UK and USAmerica, and more recently, from the CIA’s funding of the Mujahadeen (which gave rise to Osama bin Laden and the founding members of the Taliban).

We will not go over those details now. However, this would be a good opportunity to remind the famous former prime minister of a few lessons from history. The same warning goes for Blair and all the other leaders who would qualify as war criminals were they not in charge of the world’s leading powers. London and Washington have only ever had a chance at success when unloading tonnes of bombs over “islands of Blacks” (as the beginning of the 20th century taught us); over “yellow villages” in the mid-20th century; over “communist hotbeds” decades after, and finally, over “caves of terrorists” at the beginning of the 21st century.

Eray Özbek, Turkey

When the British put boots on the ground in Argentina and Uruguay, things did not go well. They had better luck with their banks (generating internal conflicts with their fake news) than with their soldiers. Whenever they put boots on the ground, it did not at all go well. Neither did it go well for their proverbial sons and daughters, the protestant fanatics in Washington, although the latter always knew how to market themselves well, which is one thing they most certainly are: good salespeople.

USAmerica’s greatest “feats” were always, at least since the mid-19th century, thanks to bombing campaigns from far, far away. For example, Veracruz was the target of various bomb showers until 1914, and even then, the world’s powers never broke the resistance of the Mexican people. In 1856 (from the sea, of course), Captain George Hollins wiped out San Juan del Norte in Nicaragua with a torrent of canon fire because the local authorities sought the detention of a USAmerican captain who had assassinated a fisher. In 1898, more than 1,300 bombs fell on Puerto Rico’s capital to free it (to this day, Puerto Ricans cannot choose the president of their country, nor do they have senators in Washington, a consequence of a century and a half of liberation). In 1927, the only chance of reversing an astonishing defeat at the hands of the famished peasants standing alongisde Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua, who had the marines and the National Guard camped out in the town of Ocotal, was with the first aerial military bombing campaign in history. 

Months prior to the famous atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that massacred 250,000 innocent people, in a single night, 100,000 non-combatant civilians died in the Japanese cities of Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama and Kobe. During the night of 10th March 1945, General Curtis LeMay ordered 1,500 tonnes of explosives to be thrown over Tokyo by 300 B-29 bombers. In total, 500,000 bombs rained down from 1:30 a.m. to 3:00 a.m., with 100,00 men, women and children dying in the space of a few hours, and a million others left critically injured. This story would be eclipsed (forgotten) due to the media spectacle of the atomic bombs that would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three months later, killing another 250,000 innocent, non-combatant civilians. The same would occur at a later date in the impoverished North Korea, where bombs would obliterate 80% of the country. Generals Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMain massacred 20% of the population without provoking the outrage of a single decent nation. Between 1969 and 1973, more bombs fell on Cambodia (500,000 tonnes) than fell on Germany and Japan during WWII. The same happened to Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan…

In 1961, after the traumatic defeat of the biggest military complex in history by a poor island, Cuba, one of the organisers, the CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, accepted it was all due to the fact that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had learned from history, while Washington had not.

Every time that Washington put ‘boots on the ground’, it either failed or achieved a parasitic success, such as in the Cuba landing in 1898, when the “rebellious Blacks” had just about won their independence, and USAmerica had to avoid a new Haiti in such close proximity. The same goes for Normandy, known as D-Day, when the Russians had already left 27 million bodies on the ground before the West stole the glory of having defeated Nazism, this cherished and immensely popular achievement among the wealthy USAmerican business class.

The few Anglo-Saxon successes have always resulted from long-distance bombing, either from the sea or from the air, and always on small islands full of Black people, some of them miniscule (such as Granada in 1983), or on countries with a famished army. The modern bombings are nothing more than an extension of the previous bombardments from the sea, as proved by the “destroyers”, the “aircraft carriers”, and even the word “marines” to refer to the parachuters themselves.

Tony Blair was in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2014. He gave a conference on Iraq, full of jokes and amusing anecdotes about the war and post-war, for which he charged a fortune. Not a word, however, about something that George W. Bush had conceded a few years back with absolute impunity: the reasons (“excuses”) for going to war had been “based on intelligence errors”. The third ally, former Spanish president José María Aznar, who wanted to lead his country out of the “corner of history”, had been more honest, conceding that he had not been intelligent enough to realise that they were making childish mistakes. From Spain, shortly before the invasion, we explained the absurdity of the arguments and the catastrophe that would follow in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the future economic crisis in USAmerica, which came in 2008. But what did that matter? Only a million or so innocent people died. “Stalin killed more…”. And Genghis Khan, and…

That night, before the smiling, illuminated face of the exotic-looking prime minister, I raised my hand to ask about the million dead bodies and the weapons of mass destruction that they never found. The microphone never reached me. Everyone was just so excited about meeting the former UK leader…

With a strong sense of frustration and forced indifference, I left the hall and went to the parking lot. On a piece of paper I wrote, for the following day: “If you owe a bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe a million, the bank has a problem”. It reminded me of the Spanish writer Ángel Ganivet: “An army that fights with long-range weapons… even if it leaves the battlefield littered with dead bodies, is a glorious army; and if the bodies are Black, they say that there are no such dead bodies… a man dressed as a peasant, who fights and kills, we consider to be an assassin.