[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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