Summary: Bello writes shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In guise of condemning the attacks Bello "explains" why they occurred in such a way as to attack the USA for multiple supposed faults through the last 60 years. These attacks have subsequently appeared in many forums. Here I respond to  each of the charges.
 

As I read the opinion piece by Walden Bello and its contents became apparent I became more and more amazed that the Bangkok Post would offer such a large forum — nearly a half page — to a terrorist fellow traveler, a Nazi sympathizer, and a person who seems to rejoice in the past victories of the repressive North Vietnamese communists. Not since I left China, where I had a nearly daily diet of the nonsense of the government's English language "Daily China" have I seen such a concentrated mess of pap.

Let's start by summarizing what Bello says: that because of past actions and policies by the USA and its intransigence, the crashing of airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon with the accompanying loss of about 6000 lives was a logical thing to do; that the US has committed many terrorist acts in the past that took far more lives than the current events; that these means of bin Laden or whoever orchestrated these events are a good and acceptable way to get the US to change it policies, and that until the US does change its policies more death and destruction is likely to and should take place.

Bello and any of his apologists are likely to point out that he calls the NYC/DC plane crashes "horrible, despicable, and unpardonable." But any such disclaimer is completely hollow and cynical. It is no different from bin Laden saying he didn't order or direct them and that, nonetheless, he (bin Laden) applauds them. If Bello really found these acts so despicable he would support the capture of the perpetrators and their punishment. But the body of his words show that he doesn't. He counsels against it! Throughout his four columns he gives excuse after excuse why the perpetrators should be pardoned. "[T]his was not the worst act of mass terrorism in US history" — its own government, according to Bello, has done far worse. "But must not such [US] actions against civilians be judged in the context of a broader strategic objective [...]?" — and that is how the terrorists should be judged says Bello. "[T]he US government hardly possesses the high ground in the current moral equation," he writes, in a way all too reminiscent of the dupes of communism saying that the US and Soviet Union were equally bad. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing freedom, we at last heard from the people of these former captive nations what a load of propaganda bunk that was.

To say that referring to the perpetrators as "people that embody evil" is "an emotional reaction" is to reveal further where Bello really stands: he starts by saying their acts are unpardonable but has quickly come to the point where he says they are quite reasonable. "The truth is the perpetrators of the deed were very rational people." For Bello, anybody that can plan ahead and achieve a goal, no matter how wicked, is a rational person. When he writes, "And while we may condemn terrorists acts — as we must, strongly" but follows with "it is another thing to expect desperate people not to adopt them" since they have been successful in the past, he really means that rather than being "unpardonable" they are to be pardoned or even applauded. The humble rising up and striking the vain and mighty, he says, is surely a worthwhile thing! He exposes his true feelings when he attributes a quote to a Chinese-Filipino: "It's horrible, but on the other hand, the US had it coming." 

So, because of his grievances with the US, Bello has made himself into an apologist for dirty regime after dirty regime (the "your enemy is my friend" syndrome) including the Hirohito-Toto led Japanese war imperialists who conquered and enslaved most of Asia. They preached liberation of the colonial Asians, but in fact colonized Korea, Taiwan, and northeast China; in these countries they killed millions upon millions of people and forcibly tried to rob them of their own culture. It is a stain on the history of Thailand that, in a "Thailand first" attitude reminiscent of some of what we read in the letters to the local paper, it was allied with Japan during W.W.II and took the opportunity to seize territory from Cambodia. And what does Bello have to say about this? Nothing! Nothing, except that he calls it "terrorism" because US bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki led directly to liberation of Korea, Taiwan, China, and the southeast asian countries of Indochina, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. According to Bello, in these actions "the US government hardly posses the high ground in the current moral equation." 

Bello, seeking to make the US look bad simply makes up figures. He says, "the atomic raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 210,000 people, most of them civilians, most perishing instantaneously." The immediate deaths in Hiroshima were between 70,000 and 80,0000 while in Nagasaki they were probably under 40,000, for a total under 120,000. Unrepentant Japanese apologists have a sign in Hiroshima that purportedly counts the deaths due to the bomb; 56 years later they claim every death from old age -- that is people who die in 2000 and 2001 — as caused by the bomb.

These deaths, whether 120,000 or 210,000 number far fewer than those the evil Japanese government was willing to inflict on its own people. When rational people saw the war as lost, the military coerced more than 1300 kamikaze pilots to fly useless suicide missions (see article by kamikaze pilot in BP of Wed. Sept. 20.) Rather than voluntarily ending the war and freeing the enslaved Chinese, Koreans, etc. the government sent 21,000 troops to their deaths in Iwo Jima and 100,000 in Okinawa — i.e. as many as actually died by nuclear bombs. It appeared from studies at the time and was later confirmed that the dictatorship would have sent another 3-4 million Japanese to their deaths (and untold number of others) before the liberation of the conquered people would have been achieved. Bello twists words to call the US rescue of Koreans and Chinese "terrorism." I suggest he visit these people and see what they have to say.

Bello complains that Dresden was bombed and many lost their lives there. Some, possibly even a large fraction, of Dresden's inhabitants would have been anti-nazi and antiwar. But most Germans at that time were supportive of their government and were part of the Nazi war machine. It was a government that began the war by terrorizing Poles, Dutch, and Belgians with unprovoked bombings of civilians, with the intent of frightening these peoples into capitulation. It was a government that on failing to accomplish a sea borne invasion of Britain did its best to destroy London. It was a government that developed and used first the V-1 and then V-2 in an attempt to bring Britain to its knees. It was a government that captured most of eastern Europe and major parts of Russia and systematically slaughtered hundreds of thousands of the captured. The allies, primarily the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States knew that the Nazi regime must be rendered powerless as soon as possible. For trying to stop the Nazis he calls the US "terrorist." If Walden Bello had been commenting in 1945 he probably would have decried "meeting violence with violence".

Bello follows a rather standard tactic of attempting to paint his adversary as black as possible. So he creates from whole cloth the idea that the US was guilty of "indiscriminate killing of civilians" in Vietnam. The facts are that the current terrorists are guilty of indiscriminate killing of civilians. That the Hamas and IRA bombers are guilty of indiscriminate -- deliberately indiscriminate killing, as that is the basis and definition of terrorism. The fact is that the North Vietnamese government, financed by the Soviet Union and Mao's China waged a 21 year war of killing — killing of three million people — to conquer the south, suppress religion, and impose their own world view. (For doing very similar things to what Ho Chi Minh did, Slobodan Milosevic now is incarcerated in the Netherlands charged with crimes against humanity.) The US fought against these evil people; the justice of the US side has been clearly demonstrated by the 26 years of tyranny in Vietnam since 1975. Vietnam's government puts out a lot of propaganda about the US having deliberately bombed hospitals and civilian sites; it is hogwash; it is propaganda. The so-called "20,000 civilians [who] were systematically assassinated under the CIA's Operation Phoenix Program in the Mekong Delta" were agents - agents without uniforms - of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. They were the terrorists killing anybody who would not be intimidated and follow communist orders. Their cohorts are the ones who, for example, went into Hue in 1968 and in three weeks systematically killed 4,000 people — a taste of what the Khmer Rouge would do seven years later.

The title of Bello's piece is "You will reap what you sow". Whoever selected this title obviously had in mind that if the US sows violence by reacting to bin Laden then it will reap more violence. But the title cuts both ways. If bin Laden was as logical as Bello paints him, bin Laden would have realized that what he has sown — the terrorist airliner crashes -- will now result in a harvest of his entire network. Bello anticipates this, saying there will be plenty more to replace bin Laden. This is true in the sense that catching one Mafioso or drug lord or corrupt politician doesn't mean there won't be more in the future. But catching some at least limits the evil they can do and does deter some of those who otherwise might have followed in their paths. The Bush plan, as I understand it, is not only to remove the immediate network, but to make those who had supported it and might have continued to support it, repent. This part of the plan may already be working, given the words of support from such unexpected quarters as Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Cuba. Even the Taleban may have decided that bin Laden and his network is a liability. And, on other fronts, we may have seen the last of the suicide bombings in Israel and the IRA bombings in northern Ireland, given the broad condemnation of such attacks that has come from Moslem leaders in Saudi Arabia and other places.

In this sense, the attack has been more like Pearl Harbor than Tet. A single incident has galvanized people and made them realize that now is the time for action; for defense; for preservation. For many, for the large, large majority who are freedom loving and generous, this attack is seen as an attack on them all, on civilization; an attack that must be repelled. For a much smaller group, groups that up to now had been terrorists in their own right, they have seen their support or potential support melt away because the right minded are repulsed by these deeds, and so out of opportunism will forswear any future actions that may make people recall the crumbling of the twin pillars of New York — those metaphorical pillars of democracy.

The underlying issue is the Middle East, Israel, Palestinians, and US Policy and eventually Bello admits it. The apologists for bin Laden make a pro forma denial of this and demand 100% proof that he is guilty. But his apologists, such as Bello, see the public evidence and proceed from there to the presumption of his guilt. After all, there were bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, bombing of the World Trade Center, and bombing of the USS Cole. And in every one of these cases there were firm links to bin Laden and much of the evidence was produced in public in trials that took place in New York City. (I happened to attend one; evil really is banal.) And bin Laden has produced videos calling for the destruction of the US. Even now, the greatest apologists, the Taleban of Afghanistan, have made a backdoor admission of this as they have asked him to "voluntarily leave." 

Bello objects to US policy in the Middle East and says that it justifies the murderous airliner attacks of last week. Let's look at the record. Rather than attacking Moslem regimes, the US has been often their greatest supporter. When the Bosnian population, largely Moslem, was attacked by Serbia, the US lead NATO in protecting them. When the Moslem Albanian population of Kosovo was attacked by Serbia, the US led NATO in protecting them. When the Soviet Union tried to install an anti-religious government in Afghanistan, the US provided the bulk of the support for those Afghanis who opposed them. When Afghanistan needed aid — food — the US was the largest donor. When a civil war in Somalia, a Moslem country, spiraled so far out of control that famine resulted, the US was the largest provider of aid. For years the US has attempted to persuade and cajole the Chinese government to respect religious liberties, including those of the Moslems in Xinjiang in the west of the country.

When Kuwait was invaded and conquered by another Arab country, the US led the coalition that freed it. But Bello writes "everybody knew that Washington's key motivation was to ensure that the region's most massive oil reserves would remain under the control of pro-western elites." Decoded, this means that if the US did not oppose and reverse the take over of Kuwait that most likely Saddam Hussein would invade and take over Saudi Arabia, the possessor of about half of the world's oil reserves. For Bello, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia is summarized as a "pro-western elite." Osama bin Laden seems to think that it despoils Saudi Arabia to have American troops stationed there. This is truly religious exclusionism far beyond what even Americans and Jews are accused of. The troops are there because, faced with the menace of Saddem Hussein's Iraq, they were as a needed guarantee of independence.

For Bello, for bin Laden, and for many other fellow travelers, what has happened is the "subordination of the interests of the peoples of the region to the US's untrammeled access to Middle East oil in order to maintain its petroleum-based civilization." Of course this is an old and false claim. The real truth is that Europe, Japan, and even Thailand are far more dependent on Middle East oil than the US. The US, in the role of NATO ally, ally to Japan, ally to Thailand, was defending their interests (as well as the principal that no member of the United Nations has the right to conquer another member) when it led the way in the gulf.

And what could Bello mean by "subordination of the interests of the peoples of the region"? Why that Saddam Hussein did not get his way! The leaders of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, the Emirates, and of course Kuwait and Saudi Arabia recognized the true interests of their people and joined the coalition against Saddam Hussein. Bello might put in the rejoinder that these governments are not all that democratic — how can they represent the people? The charge that they are not perfectly democratic is true, but most of them (Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, the Emirates) offer their people far more liberty than does Iraq. Here, it is a matter of accepting some bad to prevent much evil.
What about in Iran? I have a long time Iranian friend who studied in the USA at Louisiana State University in the early 1960s. There he resented the looks he sometimes got because he is dark, "Arab looking". When he returned to Iran he felt that Iran was "the 51st state" — in other words, a colony of the USA under the Shah. I met him when I went to Iran, pulled in by the mid-70s oil boom. As the revolution approached he was delighted with the idea that the Shah (admittedly no democrat) would be kicked out, Khomeini would come in, and American influence would be curtailed. Now, more than 20 years later he regrets it all. My friend, and nearly all the world can see that Khomeini and his followers were and are far worse than the Shah. Khomeini ruined the economy and severely curtailed human liberties. But Bello sees this as a liberation of Iran from the US.

All of the help given to Moslem states is irrelevant to Bello and bin Laden, for to them, as is often the case, one failure to take their sides erases whatever thanks there may have been for 100 previous incidents. They really only care about Israel, or more precisely, destroying it.

Bello is completely wrong to describe Israel as a "European settler state" as today more than half of the population of Israel is descended from ancestors who lived for centuries in what are now Arab lands (and earlier became Arab by conquest of the then mostly Christian and Jewish inhabitants. Their remnants make up the Christian communities of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and other lands.) In 1948 Arabs invaded Israel to end its independence. As the war got under way, repressive Arab regimes cracked down even more on Jews than had been the case in the past. Nearly the entire Jewish populations were driven out of Syria and Iraq. More than a half million Jews left Yemen and nearly another half million left Morocco for Israel. The number who came to Israel from these lands far exceeds those Arabs who left as refugees.
It is a stain on Arab and Moslem countries that what they wanted for themselves they were not willing to give to Jews. For many years before W.W.II, British Indians, led by Gandhi, were agitating for independence. At the time British India was a secular state, where Hindus, Moslems, Jains, Buddhists, and many more lived together, in relative peace. Mohammed Ali Jinah, and his Moslem League insisted on a separate country for Moslems. The result was a partition in 1947 that led to the creation of Pakistan (which later split into modern Pakistan and Bangladesh). A year later in 1948 when the partition of British Palestine was proposed and adopted by the UN the Moslem Arabs objected. The Jews on the other hand, reluctantly agreed to give up large areas where Jews were living for the sake of peace. Upon British withdrawal the Arabs fought to destroy the newly born state of Israel. Out of the clashes came not only Israel but the newly-named "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" that included what is now called the West Bank, 82% of the land of British Palestine, and whose inhabitants were ethnically more than 2/3 what are now called "Palestinians". The much smaller Jewish state retained large areas where Jews resided that it would have given up under the partition plan but it also lost important areas within old Jerusalem's walls and on the hills to the east that were populated by Jews. These people moved and were housed. Too bad the same can't be said of Arab refugees who were cynically kept in camps in spite of generous aid from the US via the UN for their resettlement.

Does the US unfairly trade with the rest of the world? Does it somehow manipulate trade rules to its advantage and the disadvantage of the rest of the world? This is a claim made by a minority of which Bello is a member. But the vast majority of the world now recognizes that it is in their own interests to trade without barriers with the world and to seek foreign investment. The largest group that has seen the errors of their ways are the once-communist countries. For decades they were mired in poverty caused by their devotion to a system that could not and did not live up to their claims. In the Soviet Union, China, and later Vietnam the government propagandists tried to claim that their people were the rich ones and that Americans and Europeans living under a capitalist market economy were the ones badly off. (In a recent visit to Vietnam I met an 18 year old college student who really believed it!) 
Here and there, however, the truth slowly sunk in. Stalin's daughter Svetlana chose the US over her own homeland because of the repression there. After three decades of Mao Zedong's deliberately ruining the Chinese economy, Deng Xiaoping took over and started the long march to prosperity for China that has been based on market principles, trading, and seeking foreign investment. The Chinese government wants to join the World Trade Organization because it knows that is good for Chinese. The communist government of Vietnam initially collectivized and imposed state control throughout the economy and of course harvested disastrous consequences. Only after near mass starvation (and probably because of contemporaneous awakenings in the Soviet Union and China) did Vietnam adopt "Doi Moi" in 1989 and begin recovery from its mistaken ways. In Vietnam I learned from "survivors" first hand about their daily search for food.
Worst of all was Cambodia. There, Pol Pot and his crew, initially financed by China and Vietnam, apparently completely bought the Maoist propaganda on how to run a country. Adopting and going beyond policies that had failed in Mao's Great Leap Forward and his forced collectivization, and coupling this with the willingness to use force (a willingness that is the hallmark of dictators that take power by force; they aren't worried about violence begetting violence) killed and starved about a million people. What does Bello say about this? He adopts the line that anything that is bad must have been caused by the US and that therefore the evils of the Khmer Rouge are to be blamed on the US. Poppycock! 
In the ASEAN countries these truths have also been recognized. Tariff barriers are coming down. Investment is wanted — even Thais worries that too much will go to China and not enough to Thailand. These are not changes imposed by the US out of some greedy motive. They are changes that have been adopted by all of these countries as the cobwebs have slowly dropped from their eyes and they have seen the route to prosperity. So when Bello complains about US rapaciousness he is simply revealing himself to be an economic illiterate attempting to blame others for self-caused problems.
Unlike Bello, many have expressed the hope the terrorists will be brought to justice without needless hurt to innocents. Among them are US President Bush, Vice President Chaney, and Secretary of State Powell. It is rather astonishing that so many seem unable to understand the clear message they are sending. Most of the Afghanis are not guilty, but their government is and if the Taleban aren't cooperative then the Bush administration will go after them as well as bin Laden. That would be good for most Afghanis who are suffering under Taleban oppression.

There is a lesson here from the cold war, the IRA conflict, the Turkish-Kurd problem, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I think is relevant to the coming war against terrorism: justice doesn't prevail at once and those who love freedom must be patient. In the case of the cold war, the Soviet Union was eventually revealed to even the doubters as an evil empire and did eventually collapse. When freedom finally arrived there the Russians themselves finally made some Americans understand how false it was to say that the United States "was as bad as we were." Only by patience, 46 years of patience, did the US and freedom prevail. Now, at last, it seems that a majority of Arabs (but barely a majority) desire to live in peace with Israel. So, patience and vigilance have allowed Israel (with US support) to reach the threshold of peace. If only the holdouts in Hamas (who are probably aligned with bin Laden) would now reform themselves, there would probably be peace. Arafat's intifada was an attempt to get by violence what could not be achieved at the peaceful bargaining table. Now, according to what I have read, even he has seen the futility of it. So, for the bin Laden - Hamas - Iranian sponsored terrorists, lots of patience will be needed. Some will be captured and some of their attacks thwarted but they will from time to time cause great damage. I'm confident that the team that took time to build a coalition to liberate Kuwait will know how to do it again.