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CounterPunch
February
15, 2003
A Monumental Hypocrisy
We
Must Raise Our Voices, March in Protest, Now and Again and Again
By EDWARD SAID
It has finally become intolerable to listen to
or look at news in this country. I've told myself over and over
again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn
on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out
what "the country" is thinking and planning, but patience
and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, designed
obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN
into going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in
moral hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's
lectures in Munich this past weekend went one step further than
the bumbling Powell in unctuous sermonising and bullying derision.
For the moment, I shall discount George Bush and his coterie
of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers like Pat
Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves
of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their
collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an
Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with
God, or if not God, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli
settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state
and defence seem to have emanated from the secular world of real
women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger
for a time over their words and activities.
First, a few preliminaries. The US has
clearly decided on war: there seem to be no two ways about it.
Yet whether the war will actually take place or not (given all
the activity started, not by the Arab states who, as  usual, seem to dither and
be paralysed at the same time, but by France, Russia and Germany)
is something else again. Nevertheless to have transported 200,000
troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, leaving aside smaller
deployments in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean only one thing.
Second, the planners of this war, as
Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are chicken hawks, that is,
hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting themselves. Wolfowitz,
Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that entirely civilian group
were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam War, yet each of
them got a deferment based on privilege, and therefore never
fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence
is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, anti-democratic
in the extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks in a war
with Iraq has nothing to do with actual military considerations.
Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its deplorable regime,
is simply not an imminent and credible threat to neighbours like
Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could easily
handle it militarily) or certainly to the US. Any argument to
the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition.
With a few outdated Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and
biological material, most of it supplied by the US in earlier
days (as Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts
for what was sold to Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and has
easily been, containable, though at unconscionable cost to the
long-suffering civilian population. For this terrible state of
affairs I think it is absolutely true to say that there has been
collusion between the Iraqi regime and the Western enforcers
of the sanctions.
Third, once big powers start to dream
of regime change--a process already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs
of this country--there is simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous
that people of such a dubious caliber actually go on blathering
about bringing democracy, modernisation, and liberalisation to
the Middle East? God knows that the area needs it, as so many
Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people have said over
and over. But who appointed these characters as agents of progress
anyway? And what entitles them to pontificate in so shameless
a way when there are already so many injustices and abuses in
their own country to be remedied? It's particularly galling that
Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be
on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have
been an election adviser to Netanyahu's extreme right- wing government
during the period 1996-9, in which he counseled the renegade
Israeli to scrap any and all peace attempts, to annex the West
Bank and Gaza, and try to get rid of as many Palestinians as
possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to the
Middle East, and does so without provoking the slightest objection
from any of the media pundits who politely (abjectly) quiz him
on national television.
Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite
its many weaknesses, its plagiarised and manufactured evidence,
its confected audio-tapes and its doctored pictures, was correct
in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has violated numerous human
rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that
and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical
about the official US position is that literally everything Powell
has accused the Ba'athists of has been the stock in trade of
every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time more flagrantly
than since the occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal detention,
assassination, assaults against civilians with missiles, helicopters
and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of
civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment,
mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatilla to mention
only the most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and
unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians
as human shields, humiliation, punishment of families, house
demolitions on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural land,
expropriation of water, illegal settlement, economic pauperisation,
attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances, killing
of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses: all
these, it should be noted with emphasis, have been carried on
with the total, unconditional support of the United States which
has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices
and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has
given the country upwards of $135 billion in economic aid on
a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by
the US government on its own citizens.
This is an unconscionable record to hold
against the US, and Mr Powell as its human symbol in particular.
As the person in charge of US foreign policy, it is his specific
responsibility to uphold the laws of this country, and to make
sure that the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of
freedom--the proclaimed central plank in the US's foreign policy
since at least 1976--is applied uniformly, without exception
or condition. How he and his bosses and co- workers can stand
up before the world and righteously sermonise against Iraq while
at the same time completely ignoring the ongoing American partnership
in human rights abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet
no one, in all the justified critiques of the US position that
have appeared since Powell made his great UN speech, has focused
on this point, not even the ever-so- upright French and Germans.
The Palestinian territories today are witnessing the onset of
a mass famine; there is a health crisis of catastrophic proportions;
there is a civilian death toll that totals at least a dozen to
20 people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands
of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move about
as curfews and at least 300 barricades impede their daily lives;
houses are blown up or bulldozed on a mass basis (60 yesterday).
And all of it with US equipment, US political support, US finances.
Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard,
is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinians'
lives that have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal
army. And he has the gall to say that he acts in God's name,
and that he (and his administration) act to serve "a just
and faithful God". And, more astounding yet, he lectures
the world on Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions even as he supports
a country, Israel, that has flouted at least 64 of them on a
daily basis for more than half a century.
But so craven and so ineffective are
the Arab regimes today that they don't dare state any of these
things publicly. Many of them need US economic aid. Many of them
fear their own people and need US support to prop up their regimes.
Many of them could be accused of some of the same crimes against
humanity. So they say nothing, and just hope and pray that the
war will pass, while in the end keeping them in power as they
are.
But it is also a great and noble fact
that for the first time since World War Two there are mass protests
against the war taking place before rather than during the war
itself. This is unprecedented and should become the central political
fact of the new, globalised era into which our world has been
thrust by the US and its super-power status. What this demonstrates
is that despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants
like Saddam and his American antagonists, despite the complicity
of a mass media that has (willingly or unwillingly) hastened
the rush to war, despite the indifference and ignorance of a
great many people, mass action and mass protest on the basis
of human community and human sustainability are still formidable
tools of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if
you wish. But that they have at least tampered with the plans
of the Washington chicken hawks and their corporate backers,
as well as the millions of religious monotheistic extremists
(Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars of religion,
is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to lecture
or speak out against these injustices I haven't found anyone
in support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition
to US action in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq,
Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan and everywhere in the Arab world--and
also ask others to force the same linkage on everyone, Arab,
American, African, European, Australian and Asian. These are
world issues, human issues, not simply strategic matters for
the United States or the other major powers.
We cannot in any way lend our silence
to a policy of war that the White House has openly announced
will include three to five hundred cruise missiles a day (800
of them during the first 48 hours of the war) raining down on
the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce "Shock
and Awe", or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as
its boastful planner a certain Mr (or is it Dr?) Harlan Ullman
has said, a Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note
that during the 1991 Gulf War after 41 days of bombing Iraq this
scale of human devastation was not even approached. And the US
has 6000 "smart" missiles ready to do the job. What
sort of God would want this to be a formulated and announced
policy for His people? And what sort of God would claim that
this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not
only of Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?
These are questions I won't even try
to answer. But I do know that if anything like this is going
to be visited on any population on earth it would be a criminal
act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals according
to the Nuremberg Laws that the US itself was crucial in formulating.
Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the
war and praise George Bush. Who knows what more evil will be
done in the name of Good? Every one of us must raise our voices,
and march in protest, now and again and again. We need creative
thinking and bold action to stave off the nightmares planned
by a docile, professionalised staff in places like Washington
and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is what
they call "greater security" then words have no meaning
at all in the ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon have contempt
for the non-white people of this world is clear. The question
is, how long can they keep getting away with it?
Yesterday's
Features
CounterPunch News Service
Slow
Lerner: It May Not Help Kids in Iraq, But It Sure Got Michael
Lerner Airtime
Andrew Murray
Tony
Blair Versus the British People
Ben Tripp
President
A**hole
Peggy Thomson
My
Close Encounter with Saddam
Gary Leupp
Meet Mr. Blowback:
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, CIA Op and Homicidal Thug
Saul Landau
Bush and Corporate Fraud
Adam Engel
A Civilian Occupation:
The Politics of Israeli Architecture
Anthony Gancarski
Jacksonville in Crisis
Rick Giombetti
Specific Threats to Democracy
Jean-David Levitte
A Warning on Iraq from France:
Make War the Last Option
Ian Gurney
Whose Side is Bush On?
Maria Engqvist
Did
the FARC Shoot Down a US Military Plane in Colombia?
Ron Jacobs
This Madness Must Cease
Josh Frank
Call to Washington:
Stonewall Bush
Website of the Day
Rock
Out Against War
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February 8
/ 9, 2003
Bill Christison
The
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Intelligence Officers for
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Memo to Bush on Iraq
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Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
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by Alexander
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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