“I have had it with the people who try to "understand" those zealots who blow up women trying to register to vote in Afghanistan but are horrified by born-again Christians going to church in Grand Rapids.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1341200,00.html

Thus writes David Aaronvitch, pro-war columnist for The Guardian. He goes on to condemn a host of enemies, “Zarqawi-symps... [and] the anything-we-do-is-wrong army” among them.

Apparently, if you oppose the war, you must be with Al-Qaeda. The logic’s been applied elsewhere. In the Cold War, if you opposed the US, you had to support the Soviets. Oppose the Republican Party, you must support the Democrats. Hate vanilla, just eat chocolate.

But you don’t have to be a fundamentalist to oppose US intervention. You just have to oppose Americans bombing hospitals to conceal civilian casualties (Mass Slaughter in Fallujah, http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m7327_) and refusing medical treatment to the injured. Or just the torture, rape and the mass murder of thousands of Iraqis.

Do these atrocities justify Zarqawi’s terrorism? Of course not. But the US has killed far more Iraqis than he has. They’ve also invaded and occupied a country. The US has extracted its blood debt for 9-11 many times over – from the bodies of innocents. Why doesn’t Aaronvitch condemn that?

The answer is he can’t, because that would require an analysis of American power. It would tie together the need for oil, the role of Israel as a base for US expansion, and the shameful history of imperialist divide-and-conquer policies meted out to Arabs and Palestinians. In short, it would require understanding. Something Aaronvitch, and all war supporters, refuse to do.

With that understanding, non-state terrorism becomes one expression of the burning hatred for America, shared by people in an ever-growing list of poor countries. Those people aren’t ‘haters of freedom’, zealots or stupid. They see very clearly what US missions to ‘bring democracy’ for the past century have accomplished: US economic and military hegemony, at the cost of poor people’s lives and dignity.

No choice is necessary between US imperialism and non-state terrorism. I choose a third alternative: mass, democratic movements of workers, peasants and oppressed people the world over, who want freedom with justice, democracy with economic security. The sort of movements the US has worked actively to destroy, while creating fundamentalists like Zarqawi and bin Laden. These movements oppose US imperialism even more bitterly than Al-Qaeda. With mass support, they pose a far graver danger to the imperialist agenda than a host of terrorists.

No, everything we do is not wrong. We can support the struggle of the Iraqi people to rid themselves of their occupiers. We can actively oppose the endless war on poor people across the globe. We can fight the structures of capitalist and military power that feed the horrors taking place. ‘Understanding’ isn’t a distraction from the war effort: it’s a direct attack on the system that produces war and bloodshed. And that’s why the war hawks condemn it.