Nation.

24

independent unions and sentencesthem to labor camps. Last year

hundreds of unionists worldwide were killed, thousands attacked
and hundreds of thousands arrested and fired.
In the coming months and during 1999the AFL-CIO will push
to make the right to organize-and the right to bargain collectively and strike-central to the political debate. Abroad, we will
continueto demandthat labor rights as well as environmentalprotections and democratic accountability be built into basic trade
and investment accords and intemational financial institutions.
To achieve this we need the voices, energy, activity and creativity of progressives and activists from all the transforming
movements of our age. Womens organizations must rouse their
members on what is happening to women in the workplace, the
violation of whose right to organize makes it easier for discrimination and harassment to go unchallenged. Civil rights groups
must see the right to organize as central to defending current
protections and making new progress. African-American and
Latino workers are the most eager to organize, and they suffer
the worst abuses when they try to do so. Human rights organizations must challenge their middle-class membership with
graphic accounts of working-class reality and make the moral
case for organizing at home. Community activists must reach out to labor organizers, support their.campaigns and draw attention to workers struggles.
To break the silence about the horrors committed on,those
seeking to organize, we need courageousjournalists to launch a
new era of muckraking about corporate abuse. In recent years,
particularlyaround the struggle against apartheidin SouthAfrica,

21.1998

progressive human rights groups have begun to report on and

protest the suppression of labor rights abroad. Ironically, in this
country the attentionpaid to brave workers who risk life and limb
in Indonesia exceeds the attention paid workers who are beaten
trying to organize in the strawberry fields of California.
To break the intellectual vacuum in which the corporate offensive now takes place, we need scholars like Brecher and
Costello to convene conferences and seminars, devise cwriculums, write articles and Op-Ed pieces, and carry the argument
into the university and the media. To break the lock that corporationshave on the law, we need creative lawyers to help devise
strategies and reforms-at a local, national and international
level-that will insure the right to organize. We need religious
activists and people of conscience to make the rights of workers
a central moral cause.
Abroad, we need environmentalistsand international organizations to make the right to organize a citizens cause. As John
Sweeney has said around the world, Democratic societies depend upon strong, independent civil societies. If labor has no
role in the global economy, then democracy has no future.
Again, intemational solidarity is not simply a union cause.
Brecher and Costello argue that labor must change its agenda,
respond to new realities and reach out to new allies. Progressives
must also see themselves not as critics and observers but as
activists and participants. Labor needs allies-strong, independent, aggressive and committed-who will make the condition
of workers at home and abroad a central part of their own
m
mission.

HOW AN AFGHAN FREEDOM FIGHTEF? BECAME AMERICAS PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.

Talks With

I .ROBERT

he last time I saw Osama bin Laden was in a

tent on a mountaintop camp in Afghanistan
last year. A few meters away was a twentyfive-foot-high air raid shelter cut into the
rock, a relic of bin Ladens days fighting the
Soviet Army, but bombproof against even a
cruise missile. Bin Laden had entered the tent in
his white Saudirobes, shaken hands with me and
sat cross-legged on the rug, when he noticed that
I had the latest Beirut daily newspapers in my
bag. He seized upon them and pored over their
pages for almost half an hour, one of his Arab mujahedeen in
Afghan clothes holding a sputtering gas lamp over the papers.
Carefdly, bin Laden read the news from Iran, from his own country, from the Israel-occupiedWest Bank. Was it true, he asked me,
that Iran was making a diplomatic demarche to Saudi Arabia?
As I sat there watching the man who had declared a holy
Fisk is
ent.

Independ-

in Laden

war against the United States a year earlierthe man who was supposedly the mastermind
of world terrorism-I reflected that he didnt
seem to know much about the world he was
supposedly terrorizing. A Saudi who regards
the leadership of his country with contempt,
he had told me at a previous meeting in 1996,
?1
If liberating my land is called terrorism, this is
a great honor for me.
But not as great as the honor bestowed on
8 him by President Clinton in the aftermath of the
American missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan last month.
Americas Public Enemy Number One--Clintons infantile
description of bin Laden-must have appealed to a man whose
simple view of the world is as politically nayve as is dangerous.
Last year, upon that remote mountaintop amid the snow-so
cold that there was ice in my hair when I awoke in the tent before
dawn-bin Laden had seemed an isolated, almost lonely figure,
largely ignored by a United States that was still obsessedWith the
evil Saddam Hussein.

21,1998

Clinton has changed all that. By endowing bin Laden with

his new title, he has given the Saudi dissident what he sought:
recognition as the greatest enemy of Western corruption,? the
leader of all resistance against US policy in the Middle East.
It would be funny if it werent so tragic, the way America now
treats its opponents as if they were Hollywood bandits. It was
OliverNorth who branded PalestiniankillerAbu Nidal Americas
Public Enemy Number One. Saddam was compared to Hitler,
even though Saddamhero-worshipsthe memory of Stalin. Before
that, when Saddam was one of our guys, busy invading Iran, we
had demonized the Ayatollah Khomeini. Libyas Muammar elQaddafi was described by Ronald Reagan as that mad dog of
the Middle East. EvenYasirArafatwas a super-terroristuntil his
support for SaddamHussein after the invasionof Kuwait rendered
him weak enough to make peace with .Israel-at which point
we turned him into a super-statesman.
I doubt if Osama bin Laden understands the hierarchy of US
hate figures-or whether he would care if he did. The Afghan
conflict against the Soviets molded him,taught him the meaning
of his religion, made him think.What I lived in two years there,
he told me, I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere.
W e n he brought his 9,000Arab fighters to support the Afghans
in their conflict against the Soviet occupation army, hacking out
the mountain trails with his construction equipment,-building
hospitals and arms dumps, he became a war hero. Some of his
current Afghan fellow fighters had been trained earlier by the
CIA in the very camps that were the target of the recent US
missiles-but whereas they had been called camps for freedom
fighters when US agents set them up in the early eighties, now
they had become camps for terrorists. He and his comrades
never saw evidence of American help in Afghanistan, he told
me, but he must have been aware of the CIAS presence.

hen I first met bin Laden, in the desert north of Khartoum

in 1993 where he was building roads for isolated villagesand, so the Egyptians were claiming, training Egyptian
President Hosni Mubaraks Islamist enemies in the same
Sudanese desert-I persuaded him to talk about the effect
of the Russian war.
Once I was only thuky meters away from the Russians and
they were trying to capture me, he said. I was under bombardment, but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep. This
experiencehas been Written about in our eqliest books. I saw a
120-millimetermortar shell land in front of me, but it did not
blow up. Four more bombs were dropped from a Russian plane
on our headquarters, buttheydid not explode.We beat the Soviet
Union. The Russians fled. No, I was never afraid of death. As
Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven. Before
a battle, God sends us sequina-tranquillity. Here was a man,
then, who felt God had protected him.My fellow Muslims did
much more than I. Many of them died but I am still alive.
I was myself in Afghanistan in 1980,when bin Laden arrived
there. I still have my reporting notes from those days. They
record Afghan mujahedeen fighters burning down schools and
cutting the throats of Afghan Communist schoolteachersbecause
the governmenthad ordered boys and girls to sit together in mixed
classes. In those days, the London Times was callingthem freedom fighters. Later, when Afghan mujahedeen shot down an

25

Nation.

II

THE WRONG TURN OF

PRAGMATIC LIBERALISM

i
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version of thinking that lost sight
of Charles Peirce and-the
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26

The Nation.

21.1998

Afghan civilian airliner canying forty-nine passengers and five

crew members (with aBritish-made Blowpipe missile), the same
paper called them crebels.yOddly enough, the word Yerrorists
was never used-except by the Russians.

Recently, we announced the founding of the E.L. Godkin Brigade,

whose purpose-isto get each of
you to recruit one friend as a new
subscriber to The Illation. Godkin
was The Nations founding editor
A in 1865 and it is in his memory
that we conduct this ambitious campaign to increase The
Nations audience. And we have some good news! So far
the campaign has brought in scores of new subscribers.
But last week it also brought a visit from 80-year-old
Mrs. Ralph Fasanella, widow of the renowned artist. A
long-time Nation subscriber, she has decided to donate a
generous number of her
drize-winning posters
to help the Brigade. Sa, while supplies last, in addifion to
an official E.L. Godkin Brigade button, each person who
successfully recruits a new Nation subscriber will be sent a
beautiful copy of The Great Strike, a moving depiction of
the historic textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912.

33

New York, %Y 10003,

(212) 209-5423

n 1996 Sudan expelled bin Laden, partly because ofAmerican

pressure-for which the United States has now rewarded
Khartoum with a missile attack-and, stripped of his passport,
he returned to the land where he fought the Russians. Already,
Arabs dressed in Afghan clothes were fighting the government
of Algeria afier Islamists were prevented fkom winning a general
election. Bin Laden regards the Saudi regime as traitors who
sold their birthright when Abdul Aziz A1 Saud failed to apply
full Islamic law. The country was set up for his family. Then,
after the discovery of p@roleum, the Saudi regime found another
support-the money to make people rich and give them the
services and life they wanted and to make them satisfied. But
this was nothing compared with what happened in 1990.
When the American troops entered SaudiArabia [after Iraqs
invasion of Kuwait], the land of the two holy places wecca and
Medinaf, there was a strong protest from the ulema [religious
authorities] and from students of the Shariah law all over the
country against the interference ofAmerican troops, bin Laden
said to me in a meeting in Afghanistanin 1996. Thisbii mistake
by the Saudi regime of inviting the American troops revealed
to nations that were
their deception. They had given their
fighting against Muslims. They [the Saudis] helped Yemen Communists againstthe SouthernYemeni Muslims and helpedkafats
regime fight against Hamas. After it had insulted and jailed the
ulema.. .the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy,
His own country still keeps contact directly with bin Laden,
via the Saudi Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, because he has
supporters among important figures in the kingdom-a fact the
United States prefers to ignore. He told me that an e&sary fkom
the Saudi royal family had offered his family 2 billion Saudi
riyals (about $535 million) if he abandoned his holy wa. He
rejected the offer.
Somewhere in the Sudanese desert, bin Laden decided that
if he could drive the Russians out ofAfghanistan, he could drive
the Americans out of the Middle East. He denied to me any involvement in the 1996 bombing of US service personnel at the
Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in which nineteen Americans
died, although he said he knew two of the three young men later
beheaded by the Saudis for the explosion. The explosion at
Khobar did not come as a direct result ofAmerican occupation
but as a result ofAmerican behavior against Muslims, he said.
When sixty Jews are killed inside Palestine, all the world gathers.. .to criticize the action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi
children [because of UN sanctions] did not receive the same reaction. Killing those Iraqi schoolchildren is a crusade against
Islam.. ..Resistance against America will spread in many, many
places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, ow ulema, have
given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans. Because
of Americas refusal to acknowledge any reason for the US
Embassy bombings in Kenya andTanzania-hatred ofAmerica,
per se, is the usual explanation-few chose to point out that they
occurred on the eighth anniversary, to the very day, of the arrival
of the first US troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990.

Nation.

21,1998

When I last saw bin Laden, he was still obsessed with the
Israeli massacre of 107 Lebanese refugees sheltering at the UN
camp at Qana in April 1996. Israel claimed it was a mistake,
the UN concluded otherwise and President Clinton d i e d it only
a tragedy-as if it was a natural disaster. It was, said bin Laden,

27

an act of international terrorism. There must be justice, he

said, and trials for the Israeli perpetrators.
Clinton used almost exactly the same words about bin Laden
andliis supporters in August. But the deaf, as usual, were talking
to the deaf.

A LEADER IN PROGRESSIVEGRASSROOTS POLITICS AUDITIONS FOR THE NATIONAL STAGE.

Rapoport Makes the LEAP

I

West
iles Rapoport is the long-distance runner
of progressive New England politics. I remember meeting him in the Connecticut
state capitol lobby shortly after the 1984
election, when he was a new legislator
from a Hartford suburb and the former director of a community-action group inspired by
Ralph Nader. His low-key voice echoing gently
around the baroque, boomy rotunda, Rapoport
talked hopefully about building a solid progressive caucus in the state legislature, reforming the states
locled-up machine politics and energizing a grassroots base.
Its hard to imagine a darker, less propitious time for the launching
of such a crusade.
Ronald Reagans re-election had just swept fifty Connecticut Democratic legislators from office, handing control of the
GeneralAssembly to Republicans. Rapoport was one of a scant
handful of Connecticut legislators who might be genuinely
termed liberal, never mind rooted in activist constituencies instead of party machinery. Connecticuts Democratic Party was
notoriously closed and conservative:As Rapoport himself wrote
a few years ago, Ideologically,the Democratic Partys operating principle was to hew just far enough to the right of center
to render the Republican Party irrelevant.
Rapoportis still in Hartford,but the
Fourteenyears later,
landscape of Connecticut politics has changed immeasurablyand Rapoport himself, who in 1994graduated from the legislature to election as Connecticuts Secretaryof State, is a large part
of the reason. The legislature now indudes several dozen selfdescribedprogressives,many with activistbackgroundsin unions,
community civil rights and other constituencies. Old, restrictive
election laws are off the books, and a regressive tax system has
beenscrapped. Now Rapoport is running for Connecticuts 1st
Congressional District seat in a fiercely contested Democratic
primary on September 15. Its a Congressional campaign with
important national implications-not just because of Rapoports
exemplary record and considerablepromise as a reform-minded
leader on the national stage but because of crucial lessons about
progressive electoral strategy over the long haul.
This years 1st Congressional District primary could be
said to have begun in 1971, when Connecticut native Ralph
Nader recruited a former Nixon Administration youth official

]
named Toby Moffett-later a famously proenvironmental Congressman, today a public
relations flack for the Monsanto chemical
conglomerate-to organize the states students
and communitiesinto a new organizationcalled
the Connecticut Citizen Action Group. CCAG
eventually signed up 100,000members, organized against toxic waste dumps and lobbied the
4 Connecticut General Assembly on such issues
as pharmaceutical subsidies for seniors.
8 It gradually it dawned on Moffetts successors-CCAGs executive directors over the years include Rapoport himself as well as his top two campaign strategists this
year, Marc Caplan and Donna Parson-that the groups citizenlobbyists were exhausting themselves to influence career politicians whose main loyalty would always be to party bosses. So
in 1980 CCAG launched a new alliance with dissident unions,
the states National Organizationfor Women and other groups to
try out a new strategy: recruiting and electing legislative candidates directly from the ranks of citizen-activist constituencies.
The result was a then-unique coalition called the Legislative
Electoral Action Program.
LEAF elected its first grassroots activist to the legislature in
1982, followed in 1984 with Rapoport himself and the former
president of Connecticut NOW LEAPS strategy: find relatively
safe Democratic districts and challenge conservative Democrats,
relying on members of the coalitions constituency groups in primaries. By 1986 LEAP had helped recruit and elect twenty-five
issues-oriented activistlegislators, rind it has elected dozens more
since. It has spawned at least a dozen similarcoalitions around the
country, including active legislative electoral operations in every
New England state, Wisconsin, Illinois A d elsewhere.
The high-water mark of this new coalition politics came in
1991,when Rapoport and other progressivesjoined with former
Republican Lowell Weicker, elected governor on an independent line, to pass a once-unthinkablestate income tax over massive
protests from Republicans, conservative Democrats and rightwing talk-show hosts. Rapoport and other Connecticut progressives also took up crusades to abolish restrictive ballot-access
laws, petition requirements and other machinery that party leaders
had employed for years to control elections and crush dissidents.
From very early on, says Rapoport, it became clear that democracy itself was the issue: the barriers to participation, the