NEWS

Historian: retaliation against civilians immoral, could lead to bigger problems

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- The United States must identify and deal with those responsible for the massive loss of innocent lives in the Northeast, but doing so in a careful, judicious way is critical for both moral and practical reasons, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Middle East expert says.

Bombings or missile attacks that kill civilians in such countries as Afghanistan will further inflame the situation and be morally indistinguishable from terrorist acts, said Dr. Sarah D. Shields, associate professor of history. Such actions also clearly could create more fanatical enemies for this nation.

"Civilians in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan live under repressive regimes, and most have no control over what their governments or small groups do," Shields said. "They do, however, recognize when innocents are being killed."

People in the United States did not blame Christians for the Oklahoma City bombing and did not threaten to bomb Kansas for harboring Timothy McVeigh, said the scholar, who in no way condoned but wanted to explain the Tuesday violence.

"So to blame Muslims or Arabs if this horrific crime turns out to have been done by Muslims or Arabs is no more acceptable than to blame Christians for McVeigh. To bomb a civilian population for the acts of a few killers seems worse than awful."

Bombing to satisfy a need for vengeance will not bring back those who died at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania, and neither will it serve the nation’s short- or long-term best interests, Shields said.

"When we historians look at the past and try to understand the present through the past, what we consistently see is what CIA people call ‘blowback,’" Shields said. "Consequences of retaliatory acts often make things worse than they would have been otherwise."

When President Reagan sent jets to bomb Libya 15 years ago, a Libyan agent was later convicted of planting a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 278 people, she said. That bomb was obviously a reaction to what some Libyans perceived as an unprovoked and unacceptable bombing of their citizenry.

During the Clinton administration, U.S. forces later attacked Afghanistan, killing many civilians and in the Sudan killed hundreds more while destroying a pharmaceutical plant that was one of the few factories capable of producing antibiotics for children, the historian added. The plant’s owner later sued the U.S. government, which produced no evidence to justify its actions.

"Not matter where it is, it is not acceptable to retaliate against innocent populations," Shields said. "That is what happened here on Tuesday. You had people retaliating against what they saw as symbols of the United States by killing innocents. Why would we want to do the same things as those people whose crimes we abhor?"

U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after Operation Desert Storm have led to the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children in the past decade through diarrhea and other illnesses, she said. While most Americans know little or nothing about that staggering toll, it is not lost on the rest of the region. Records show the U.S. government predicted the sanctions would cause massive child deaths, but maintained them anyway.

"I think most Americans don’t have adequate information," Shields said. "When I ask my students why would people in the Middle East be angry at America, they cannot begin to answer. It’s been a long time, for example, since the news media reported much about our bombing Iraq, but we’re still doing it every week, and there are often casualties."

Most Americans don’t know that most of the Islamic political violence against the U.S. has been a result of American involvement in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, she said. Few know, for example, that missiles and rockets Israelis fire at Palestinians say "Made in the United States."

"We could not have predicted what the consequences of our engagement in this regional violence would be, and now it is coming back to haunt us," Shields said. "We don’t know what engaging in massive military retaliation against civilian populations will lead to, either. We have just now begun to experience the helplessness, vulnerability and anger that other attacked people in the Middle East have felt for years. It’s terrible."

The historian said her young daughter wanted her to pass a message to students, other audiences and the news media.

"She said this is our chance to reexamine ourselves and our own behavior and to say we are going to be different this time," Shields said. "We are not going to retaliate out of vengeance -- we’re going to find out who did it, put them on trial and listen to why they are so angry. Then we will reassess how we will deal with this anger.

"Revenge is not the answer, my daughter said. It is revenge that put us in this situation to begin with."

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Note: Shields can be reached at (919) 962-8078 (w), 933-0187 (h) or sshields@email.unc.edu