[Reader-list] Said on the US, Iraq and Palestine
Monica Narula
monica at sarai.net
Fri Oct 18 15:25:58 IST 2002
Essay by Edward Said, taken from the Al-Ahram Weekly
Many parts of Lebanon were bombed heavily by Israeli warplanes on 4
June, 1982. Two days later the Israeli army entered Lebanon through
the country's southern border. Menachem Begin was prime minister,
Ariel Sharon his minister of defense. The immediate reason for the
invasion was an attempted assassination in London of the Israeli
ambassador, but then, as now, the blame was placed by Begin and
Sharon on the "terrorist organisation" of the PLO, whose forces in
South Lebanon had actually observed a cease-fire for about one full
year before the invasion. A few days later, on 13 June, Beirut was
under Israeli military siege, even though, as the campaign began,
Israeli government spokesmen had cited the
Awali River, 35 kilometres north of the border, as their goal. Later,
it was to emerge without equivocation that Sharon was trying to kill
Yasser Arafat, by bombing everything around the defiant Palestinian
leader. Accompanying the siege was a blockade of humanitarian aid,
the cutting off of water and electricity, and a sustained aerial
bombing campaign that destroyed hundreds of Beirut buildings and, by
the end of the siege in late August, had killed 18,000 Palestinians
and Lebanese, most of them civilians.
Lebanon had been wracked with a terrible civil war since the spring
of 1975 and, although Israel had only once sent its army into Lebanon
before 1982, had been sought out as an ally by the Christian
right-wing militias early on. With a stronghold in East Beirut, these
militias cooperated with Sharon's forces right through the siege,
which ended after a horrendous day of indiscriminate bombing on 12
August, and of course the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon's
main ally was Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Phalanges Party, who
was elected Lebanon's president by the parliament on 23 August.
Gemayel hated the Palestinians who had unwisely entered the civil war
on the side of the National Movement, a loose coalition of left-wing
and Arab nationalist parties that included Amal, a forerunner of
today's Hizbullah Shi'ite movement that was to play the major role in
driving out the Israelis in May 2000. Faced with the prospect of
direct Israeli vassalage after Sharon's army had in effect brought
about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred. He was
assassinated on 14 September. Two days later the camp massacres began
inside a security cordon provided by the Israeli army so that
Bashir's vengeful fellow-Christian extremists could do their hideous
work unopposed and undistracted.
Under UN and of course US supervision, French troops had entered
Beirut on August. They were to be joined by US and other European
forces a little later, although PLO fighters began their evacuation
from Lebanon on 21 August. By the 1st of September, that evacuation
was over, and Arafat plus a small band of advisers and soldiers were
lodged in Tunis.Meanwhile the Lebanese civil war continued until
about 1990, when a concordat was fashioned together in Taif, more or
less restoring the old confessional system which remains in place
today. In mid-1994, Arafat -- still head of the PLO -- and some of
those same advisers and soldiers were able to enter Gaza as part of
the so-called Oslo agreements. Earlier this year Sharon was quoted as
regretting his failure to kill Arafat in Beirut. Not for want of
trying though, since dozens of hiding places and headquarters were
smashed into rubble with great loss of life. 1982 hardened Arabs, I
think, to the notion that not only would Israel use advanced
technology (planes, missiles, tanks, and helicopters) to attack
civilians indiscriminately, but that neither the US nor the other
Arabs would do anything at all to stop the practice even if it meant
targeting leaders and capital cities. (For more on this episode see
Rashid Khalidi, Under Siege, New York 1986; Robert Fisk, Pity the
Nation, London 1990; more specifically on the Lebanese civil war,
Jonathan Randall, Going All the Way, New York, 1983).
Thus ended the first full-scale contemporary attempt at military
regime change by one sovereign country against another in the Middle
East. I bring it up as a messy backdrop to what is occurring now.
Sharon is now Israel's prime minister, his armies and propaganda
machine once again surrounding and dehumanising Arafat and the
Palestinians as "terrorists". It is worth recalling that the word
"terrorist" began to be employed systematically by Israel to describe
any Palestinian act of resistance beginning in the mid-1970s. That
has been the rule ever since, especially during the first Intifada of
1987-93, eliminating the distinction between resistance and pure
terror and effectively depoliticising the reasons for armed struggle.
During the 1950s and 60s Ariel Sharon learned his spurs, so to speak,
by heading the infamous Unit 101, which killed Arab civilians and
razed their houses with the approval of Ben-Gurion. He was in charge
of the pacification of Gaza in 1970-1. None of this, including the
1982 campaign, ever resulted in getting rid of the Palestinian
people, or in changing the map or the regime enough by military means
to ensure a total Israeli victory.
The main difference between 1982 and 2002 is that the Palestinians
now being victimised and besieged are in Palestinian territories that
were occupied in 1967 and where they have remained despite the
ravages of the occupation, the destruction of the economy, and of the
whole civilian infrastructure of collective life. The main similarity
is of course the disproportional means used to do it, eg, the
hundreds of tanks and bulldozers used to enter towns and villages
like Jenin or refugee camps like Jenin's and Deheisheh, to kill,
vandalise, prevent ambulances and first-aid workers from helping,
cutting off water and electricity, etc. All with the support of the
US whose president actually went as far as calling Sharon a man of
peace during the worst rampages of March and April 2002. It is
significant of how Sharon's intention went far beyond "rooting out
terror" that his soldiers destroyed every computer and then carried
off the files and hard drives from the Central Bureau of Statistics,
the Ministry of Education, of Finance, of Health, cultural centres,
vandalising officers and libraries, all as a way of reducing
Palestinian collective life to a pre- modern level.
I don't want to rehearse my criticisms of Arafat's tactics or the
failures of his deplorable regime during the Oslo negotiations and
thereafter. I have done so at length here and elsewhere. Besides, as
I write the man is quite literally hanging on to life by his teeth;
his crumbling quarters in Ramallah are also still besieged while
Sharon does everything possible to injure him short of actually
having him killed. What concerns me is the whole idea of regime
change as an attractive prospect for individuals, ideologies and
institutions that are asymmetrically more powerful than their
adversaries. What kind of thinking makes it relatively easy to
conceive of great military power as licensing political and social
change on a scale not imagined before, and to do so with little
concern for the damage on a vast scale that such change necessarily
entails? And how do the prospects of not incurring much risk of
casualties for one's own side stimulate more and still more fantasies
about surgical strikes, clean war, high technology battlefields,
changing the entire map, creating democracy and the like, all of it
giving rise to ideas of omnipotence, wiping the slate clean, and
being in ultimate control of what matters to "our" side?
During the current American campaign for regime change in Iraq, it is
the people of Iraq, the vast majority of whom have paid a terrible
price in poverty, malnutrition and illness as a result of 10 years of
sanctions, who have dropped out of sight. This is completely in
keeping with US Middle East policy built as it is on two mighty
pillars, the security of Israel and
plentiful supplies of inexpensive oil. The complex mosaic of
traditions, religions, cultures, ethnicities, and histories that make
up the Arab world -- especially in Iraq -- despite the existence of
nation-states with sullenly despotic rulers, are lost to US and
Israeli strategic planners. With a 5000-year old history, Iraq is
mainly now thought of as either a "threat" to
its neighbours which, in its currently weakened and besieged
condition, is rank nonsense, or as a "threat" to the freedom and
security of the United States, which is more nonsense. I am not going
to even bother here to add my condemnations of Saddam Hussein as a
dreadful person: I shall take it for granted that he certainly
deserves by almost every standard to be ousted and punished. Worst of
all, he is a threat to his own people.
Yet since the period before the first Gulf War, the image of Iraq as
in fact a large, prosperous and diverse Arab country has disappeared;
the image that has circulated both in media and policy discourse is
of a desert land peopled by brutal gangs headed by Saddam. That
Iraq's debasement now has, for example, nearly ruined the Arab book
publishing industry given that Iraq provided the largest number of
readers in the Arab world, that it was one of the few Arab countries
with so large an educated and competent professional
middle-class, that it has oil, water and fertile land, that it has
always been the cultural centre of the Arab world (the Abbasid empire
with its great literature, philosophy, architecture, science and
medicine was an Iraqi contribution that is still the basis for Arab
culture), that to other Arabs the bleeding wound of Iraqi suffering
has, like the Palestinian cavalry, been a source of continuing sorrow
for Arabs and Muslims alike -- all this is literally never mentioned.
Its vast oil reserves, however, are and, as the argument goes, if
"we" took them away from Saddam and got hold of them we won't be so
dependent on Saudi oil. That too is rarely cited as a factor in the
various debates racking the US Congress and the media. But it is
worth mentioning that second to Saudi Arabia, Iraq has the largest
oil reserves on earth, and the roughly 1.1 trillion dollars worth of
oil -- much of it already committed by Saddam to Russia, France, and
a few other countries -- that have been available to Iraq are a
crucial aim of US strategy, something which the Iraqi National
Congress has used as a trump card with non-US oil consumers. (For
more details on all this see Michael Klare, "Oiling the Wheels of
War," The Nation, 7Oct). A good deal of the bargaining between Putin
and Bush concerns how much of a share of that oil US companies are
willing to promise Russia. It is eerily reminiscent of the three
billion dollars offered by Bush Senior to Russia. Both Bushes are oil
businessmen after all, and they care more about that sort of
calculation than they do about the delicate points of Middle Eastern
politics, like re-wrecking Iraq's civilian infrastructure.
Thus the first step in the dehumanisation of the hated Other is to
reduce his existence to a few insistently repeated simple phrases,
images and concepts. This makes it much easier to bomb the enemy
without qualm. After 11 September, this has been quite easy for
Israel and the US to do with respectively the Palestinians and the
Iraqis as people. The important thing
to note is that by an overwhelming preponderance the same policy and
the same severe one, two, or three stage plan is put forward
principally by the same Americans and Israelis. In the US, as Jason
Vest has written in The Nation (September 2/9), men from the very
right-wing Jewish Institute for National Security (JINSA) and the
Center for Security Policy (CSP) populate Pentagon and State
Department committees, including the one run by Richard Perle
(appointed by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld). Israeli and American security
are equated, and JINSA spends the "bulk of its budget taking a bevy
of retired US generals and admirals to Israel". When they come back,
they write op-eds and appear on TV hawking the Likud line. Time
magazine ran a piece on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, many of
whose members are drawn from JINSA and CSP, in its 23 August issue
entitled "Inside the Secret War Council". For his part, Sharon has
numbingly repeated that his campaign against Palestinian terrorism is
identical with the American war on terrorism generally, Osama Bin
Laden and Al-Qa'eda in particular. And they, he claims, are in turn
part of the same Terrorist International that includes many Muslims
all over Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, even if Bush's axis
of evil seems for the moment to be concentrated on Iraq, Iran and
North Korea. There are now 132 countries with some sort of American
military presence, all of it linked to the war on terror, which
remains undefined and floating so as to whip up more patriotic frenzy
and fear and support for military action on the domestic front, where
things go from bad to worse. Every major West Bank and Gaza area is
occupied by Israeli troops who routinely kill and/or detain
Palestinians on the grounds that they are "suspected" terrorists and
militants; similarly, houses and shops are often demolished with the
excuse that they shelter bomb factories, terrorist cells, and
militant meeting places. No proof is given, none asked for by
reporters who accept the unilateral Israeli designation without a
murmur.
An immense carpet of mystification and abstraction has therefore been
laid down all over the Arab world by this effort at systematic
dehumanisation. What the eye and ear perceive are terror, fanaticism,
violence, hatred of freedom, insecurity and, the ultimate, weapons of
mass destruction (WPD) which are to be found not where we know they
are and never looked for (in Israel, Pakistan, India and obviously
the US among others) but in the hypothetical spaces of the terrorist
ranks, Saddam's hands, a fanatical gang, etc. A constant figure in
the carpet is that Arabs hate Israel and Jews for no other reason
except that they hate America too. Potentially Iraq is the most
fearsome enemy of Israel because of that country's economic and human
resources; Palestinians are formidable because they stand in the way
of complete Israeli hegemony and land occupation. Right-wing Israelis
like Sharon who represent the Greater Israel ideology claiming all of
historical Palestine as a Jewish homeland have been especially
successful at making their view of the region the dominant one among
US supporters of Israel. A comment by Uzi Landau, Israeli internal
security minister (and member of the Likkud Party) on US TV this
summer stated that all this talk of "occupation" was nonsense. We are
a people coming home. He was not even quizzed about this
extraordinary concept by Mort Zuckerman, host of the programme,
also owner of US News and World Report and president of the Council
of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations. But, Israeli journalist
Alex Fishman, in Yediot Aharanot of 6 September, describes the
"revolutionary ideas" of Condoleeza Rice, Rumsfeld (who now also
refers to "so-called occupied territories"), Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz,
Douglas Feith and Richard Perle (who commissioned the notorious Rand
study designating Saudi Arabia as
the enemy and Egypt as the prize for America in the Arab world) as
being terrifyingly hawkish because they advocate regime change in
every Arab country. Fishman quotes Sharon as saying that this group,
many of them members of JINSA and CCP, and connected to the AIPAC
affiliate the Washington Institute of Near East Affairs, dominates
Bush's
thinking (if that's the right word for it); he says, "next to our
American friends Effi Eitam [one of the Israeli cabinet's most
remorseless hard-liners] is a total dove."
The other, more scary side of this is the unchallenged proposition
that if "we" don't pre-empt terrorism (or any other potential enemy),
we will be destroyed. This is now the core of US security strategy
that is regularly drummed out in interviews and talk shows by Rice,
Rumsfeld, and Bush himself. The formal statement of this view
appeared a short time ago in the National Security Strategy of the
United States, an official paper prepared as an over-all manifesto
for the administration's new, post-Cold War foreign policy. The
working presumption is that we live in an exceptionally dangerous
world with a network of enemies that does in fact exist, that it has
factories, offices, endless numbers of members, and that its entire
existence is given up to destroying "us", unless we get them first.
This is what frames and gives legitimacy to the war on terrorism and
on Iraq, for which the Congress and the UN are now being asked to
give endorsement.
Fanatical individuals and groups do exist, of course, and many of
them are generally in favor of somehow harming either Israel or the
US. On the other hand, Israel and the US are widely perceived in the
Islamic and Arab worlds first of having created the so-called jihadi
extremists of whom Bin Laden is the most famous, and second of
blithely overriding international law and UN resolutions in the
pursuit of their own hostile and destructive policies in those
worlds. David Hirst writes in a Guardian column datelined Cairo that
even Arabs who oppose their own despotic regimes "will see it [the US
attack on Iraq] as an act of aggression aimed not just at Iraq, but
at the whole Arab world; and what will make it supremely intolerable
is that it will be done on behalf of Israel, whose acquisition of a
large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction seems to be as
permissible as theirs is an abomination" (6 Sept).
I am also saying that there is a specific Palestinian narrative and,
at least since the mid-1980s, a formal willingness to make peace with
Israel that is quite contrary to the more recent terrorist threat
represented by Al-Qa'eda or the spurious threat supposedly embodied
by Saddam Hussein, who is a terrible man of course, but is scarcely
able to wage intercontinental war; only occasionally is it admitted
by the administration that he might be a threat to Israel, but that
seems to be one of his grievous sins. None of his neighbours
perceives him as a threat. The Palestinians and Iraq get mixed up in
this scarcely perceptible way so as to constitute a menace which the
media reinforces time and time again. Most stories about the
Palestinians that appear in genteel and influential mass-circulation
publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times magazine show
Palestinians as bomb-makers, collaborators, suicide bombers, and only
that. Neither of these publications has published anything from the
Arab viewpoint since 9/11. Nothing at all.
So that when administration flaks like Dennis Ross (in charge of
Clinton's side of the Oslo negotiations, but both before and after
his stint in that job a member of an Israeli lobby affiliate) keeps
saying that the Palestinians turned down a generous Israeli offer at
Camp David, he is flagrantly distorting the facts, which as several
authoritative sources have shown, was that Israel conceded
non-contiguous Palestinian areas with Israeli security posts and
settlements surrounding them all and with no common border between
Palestine and any Arab state (eg, Egypt in the south, Jordan in the
east). Why words like "generous" and "offer" should apply to
territory illegally held by an occupying power in contravention of
international law and UN resolutions, no one has bothered to ask. But
given the power of the media to repeat, re- repeat and underline
simple assertions, plus the untiring efforts of the
Israeli lobby to repeat the same idea -- Dennis Ross himself has been
singularly obdurate in his insistence on this falsehood -- it is now
locked into place that the Palestinians chose "terror instead of
peace". Hamas and Islamic Jihad are seen not as (a perhaps misguided)
part of the Palestinian struggle to be rid of Israeli military
occupation, but as part of the general Palestinian desire to
terrorise, threaten, and be a menace. Like Iraq.
In any event, with the US administration's newest and rather
improbable claim that secular Iraq has been giving haven and training
to the madly theocratic Al-Qa'eda, the case against Saddam seems to
have been closed. The prevailing (but by no means uncontested)
government consensus is that since UN inspectors cannot ascertain
what he has of WMD, what he has hidden and what he might still do, he
should be attacked and removed. The whole point of going to the UN
for authorisation from the US point of view is to get a resolution so
stiff and so punitive that no matter whether or not Saddam Hussein
complies he will be so incriminated with having violated
"international law" that his mere existence will warrant military
regime change. In late September, on the other hand, in a Security
Council resolution passed unanimously (with US abstention), Israel
was enjoined to end its siege of Arafat's Ramallah compound and to
withdraw from Palestinian territory illegally occupied since March
(for which Israel's excuse has been "self-defense"). Israel has
refused to comply, and the underlying US rationale for the US not
doing much to enforce even its own stated position is that "we"
understand that Israel must defend its citizens. Why the UN is
to be sought after in one instance, ignored in another, is one of
those inconsistencies that the US simply indulges in.
A small group of unexamined and self-invented phrases such as
anticipatory preemption or preventive self-defense are bandied about
by Donald Rumsfeld and his colleagues to persuade the public that the
preparations for war against Iraq or any other state in need of
"regime change" (or, the other somewhat rarer euphemism,
"constructive destruction") are buttressed by the notion of
self-defense. The public is kept on tenterhooks by repeated red or
orange alerts, people are encouraged to inform law enforcement
authorities of
"suspicious" behaviour, and thousands of Muslims, Arabs and South
Asians have been detained, and in some cases arrested on suspicion.
All of this is carried out at the president's behest as a facet of
patriotism and love of America. I still have not been able to
understand what it means to love a country (in US political
discourse, love of Israel is also a current phrase) but it seems to
mean unquestioning blind loyalty to the powers that be, whose
secrecy, evasiveness and willful refusal to engage with an alert
public, which for the time being doesn't seem to be awakened into
coherent or systematic responsiveness, has
concealed the ugliness and destructiveness of the whole Iraq and
Middle East policy of the Bush administration.
So powerful is the United States in comparison with most other major
countries combined that it can't really be constrained by or be
compelled to obey any international system of conduct, not even one
its secretary of state may wish to. Along with the abstractness of
whether "we" should go to war against Iraq 7000 miles away,
discussion of foreign policy denudes other people of any thick or
real, human identity; Iraq and Afghanistan seen from
the bombsights of a smart missile or on television are at best a
chess board which "we" decide to enter, destroy, re-construct, or
not, at will. The word "terrorism", as well asthe war on it, serves
nicely to further this sentiment since in comparison with many
Europeans, the great majority of Americans have had no contact or
lived experience with the Muslim lands and peoples and therefore feel
no sense of the fabric of life that a sustained bombing
campaign (as in Afghanistan) would tear to shreds. And, seen as it
is, like an emanation from nowhere except from well- financed
madrasas on the basis of a "decision" by people who hate our freedoms
and who are jealous of our democracy, terrorism engages polemicists
in the most extravagant, if unsituated, and non-political debates.
History and politics have disappeared, all because memory, truth, and
actual human existence have effectively been downgraded. You cannot
speak about Palestinian suffering or Arab frustration because
Israel's presence in the US prevents it. At a fervently pro-Israel
demonstration in May, Paul Wolfowitz mentioned Palestinian suffering
in passing, but he was loudly booed and never could refer to it again.
Moreover, a coherent human rights or free trade policy that
consistently sticks to the endlessly underlined virtues of human
rights, democracy, and free economies that we are constitutively
believed to stand for is likely to be undermined domestically by
special interest groups (as witness the influence of the ethnic
lobbies, the steel and defense industries, the oil cartel, the
farming industry, retired people, gun lobby, to mention only a
few). Every one of the 500 congressional districts represented in
Washington, for instance, has a defense or defense-related industry
in it; so as Secretary of State James Baker said just before the
first Gulf War, the real issue in that war against Iraq was "jobs".
When it comes to foreign affairs, it is worth remembering that only
something like 25-30 per cent (compare that with the 15 per cent of
Americans who have actually travelled abroad) of members of Congress
even have passports, and what they say or think has less to do with
history, philosophy or ideals and more to do with who influences the
member's campaign, sends money, etc. Two incumbent House members,
Earl Hilliard of Alabama and Cynthia
McKinney of Georgia, supportive of the Palestinian right to
self-determination and critical of Israel, were recently defeated by
relatively obscure candidates who were well-financed by what was
openly cited as New York (ie Jewish) money from outside their states.
The defeated pair were berated by the press as extremist and
unpatriotic.
As far as US Middle East policy is concerned, the Israeli lobby has
no peer and has turned the legislative branch of the US government
into what former Senator Jim Abourezk once called Israeli-occupied
territory. No comparable Arab lobby even exists, much less functions
effectively. As a case in point the Senate will periodically issue
forth with unsolicited resolutions sent to the president that stress,
underline, re-iterate American support for Israel. There was such a
resolution in May, just at the time when Israeli forces were
occupying and in effect destroying all the major West Bank towns. One
of the drawbacks of this wall-to-wall endorsement of Israel's most
extreme policies is that in the long run it is
simply bad for Israel's future as a Middle East country. Tony Judt
has well argued that case, suggesting that Israel's dead end ideas
about staying on in Palestinian land will lead nowhere and simply put
off the inevitable withdrawal.
The whole theme of the war against terrorism has permitted Israel and
its supporters to commit war crimes against the entire Palestinian
population of the West Bank and Gaza, 3.4 million of them who have
become (as the going phrase has it) non-combatant collateral damage.
Terje-Roed Larsen, who is the UN's special administrator for the
occupied
territories, has just issued a report charging Israel with inducing a
humanitarian catastrophe: unemployment has reached 65 per cent, 50
per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, and the
economy, to say nothing of people's lives, has been shattered. In
comparison with this, Israeli suffering and insecurity is
considerably less: there aren't Palestinian tanks occupying any part
of Israel, or even challenging Israeli settlements. During the past
two weeks Israel has killed 75 Palestinians, many of them children,
it has demolished houses, deported people, razed valuable
agricultural land, kept everyone indoors under 80-hour curfews at a
stretch, not permitted civilians through roadblocks or allowed
ambulances and medical aid through, and as usual cut off water and
electricity. Schools and universities simply cannot function. While
these are daily occurrences which, like the occupation itself and the
dozens of UN Security Council resolutions, have been in effect for at
least 35 years, they are mentioned in the US media only occasionally,
as endnotes for long articles about Israeli government debates, or
the disastrous suicide bombings that have
occurred. The tiny phrase "suspected of terrorism" is both the
justification and the epitaph for whomever Sharon chooses to have
killed. The US doesn't object except in the mildest terms, eg, it
says, this is not helpful but this does little to deter the next
brace of killings.
We are now closer to the heart of the matter. Because of Israeli
interests in this country, US Middle East policy is therefore
Israelo-centric. A post-9/11 chilling conjuncture has occurred in
which the Christian Right, the Israeli lobby, and the Bush's
administration's semi-religious belligerency is theoretically
rationalised by neo-conservative hawks whose view of the Middle East
is committed to the destruction of Israel's enemies, which is
sometimes given the euphemistic label of re-drawing the map by
bringing regime change and "democracy" to the Arab countries who most
threaten Israel. (See "The Dynamics of World Disorder: Which God is
on Whose Side?" by Ibrahim Warde, LeMonde Diplomatique, September
2002 and "Born-Again Zionists" by Ken Silverstein and Michael
Scherer, Mother Jones, October 2002). Sharon's campaign for
Palestinian reform is simply the other side of his effort to destroy
the Palestinians politically, his life-long ambition. Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Syria, even Jordan have been variously threatened, even
though, dreadful regimes though they may be, they were protected and
supported by the US since World War II, as indeed
was Iraq.
In fact, it seems obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Arab
world that its parlous state is likely to get a whole lot worse once
the US begins its assault on Iraq. Supporters of the administration's
policy occasionally say vague things like how exciting it will be
when we bring democracy to Iraq and the other Arab states, without
much consideration for what exactly, in terms of lived experience,
that will mean for the people who actually live there, especially
after B-52 strikes tear their land and homes apart relentlessly. I
can't imagine that there is a single Arab or Iraqi who would not like
to see Saddam Hussein removed. All the indications are that
US/Israeli military action have made things a lot worse on a daily
basis for ordinary people, but this is nothing in comparison with
the terrible anxiety, psychological distortions and political
malformations imposed on their societies.
Today neither the expatriate Iraqi opposition that has been
intermittently courted by at least two US administrations, nor the
various US generals like Tommy Franks, has much credibility as
post-war rulers of Iraq. Nor does there seem to have been much
thought given to what Iraq will need once the regime is changed, once
the internal actors get moving again, once even the Baath is
de-toxified. It may be the case that not even the Iraqi army will
lift a
finger in battle on behalf of Saddam. Interestingly though, in a
recent congressional hearing three former generals from the US's
Central Command, have expressed serious and, I would say, crippling
reservations about the hazards of this whole adventure as it is being
planned militarily. But even those doubts do not sufficiently address
the country's seething internal
factionalism and ethno- religious dynamic, particularly after 30
debilitating years under the Baath Party, UN sanctions, and two major
wars (three if and when the US attacks). No one in the US, no one at
all has any real idea of what might happen in Iraq, or Saudi Arabia,
or Egypt if a major military intervention takes place. It is enough
to know, and then to shudder, that Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis are
the administration's two major expert advisers. Both are virulently
and ideologically anti-Arab as well as discredited by the majority of
their colleagues in the field. Lewis has never lived in the Arab
world, and what he has to say about it is reactionary rubbish; Ajami
is from South Lebanon, a man who was once a progressive
supporter of the Palestinian struggle who has now converted to the
far Right and has espoused Zionism and American imperialism without
reservation.
9/11 might have provided a period of national reflection and the
pondering of US foreign policy after the shock of that unconscionable
atrocity. Such terrorism as that most certainly needs to be
confronted and forcefully dealt with, but in my opinion it is always
the aftermath of a forceful response that has to be considered first,
not just the immediate, reflexive and violent response. No one would
argue today, even after the rout of the Taliban, that Afghanistan is
now a much better and more secure place from the standpoint of the
country's still suffering citizens. Nation-building is clearly not
the US's priority there since other wars in different places draw
attention away from the last battlefield. Besides, what does it mean
for Americans to build a nation with a culture and history as
different from theirs as Iraq? Both the Arab world and the United
States are far more complex and dynamic places than the platitudes of
war and the resonant phrases about reconstruction would allow. That
is obvious in post-US attacks on Afghanistan.
To make matters more complicated, there are dissenting voices of
considerable weight in Arab culture today, and there are movements of
reform across a wide front. The same is true of the United States
where, to judge from my recent experiences lecturing at various
campuses, most citizens are anxious about the war, anxious to know
more, above all, anxious not to go to war with such messianic
bellicosity and vague aims in mind. Meanwhile, as The Nation put it
in its last editorial, the country marches toward war as if in a
trance, while with an increasing number of exceptions, Congress has
simply abdicated its role of representing the people's interest. As
someone who has lived within the two cultures all my life it is
appalling that the clash of civilisations, that reductive and vulgar
notion so much in vogue now, has taken over thought and action. What
we need to put in place is a universalist
framework for comprehending and dealing with Saddam Hussein as well
as Sharon, the rulers of Myanmar, Syria, Turkey, and a whole host of
those countries where depredations are endured without sufficient
resistance. Demolishing houses, torture, the denial of a right to
education are to be opposed wherever they occur. I know no other way
of re-creating or restoring the framework but through education, and
the fostering of open discussion, exchange and intellectual honesty
that will have no truck with concealed special pleading or the
jargons of war, religious extremism, and pre-emptive "defense". But
that alas takes a long time, and to judge from the governments of the
US and the UK, its little partner, wins
no votes. We must do everything in our power to provoke discussion
and embarrassing questions, there by slowing down and finally
stopping the recourse to war that has now become a theory and not
just a practice.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
--
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net
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