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April 22,
2003
The Appalling Consequences
are Now Clear
What
is Happening in the United States?
by EDWARD SAID
Editors' note: This is a fuller version
of what originally ran on the CounterPunch site on April 21.
In a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate
floor on March 19, the day the war was launched against Iraq,
Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and the most eloquent
speaker in that chamber, asked "what is happening to this
country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates
our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international
order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using
our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when
the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?" No one
bothered to answer him, but as the vast American military machine
now planted in Iraq begins to stir restlessly in other directions
in the name of the American people, their love of freedom, and
their deep-seated values, these questions give urgency to the
failure, if not the corruption of democracy that we are living
through.
Let's examine first what US Middle East
policy has wrought since George W. Bush came to power almost
three years ago in an election decided finally by the Supreme
Court, not by the popular vote. Even before the atrocities of
September 11, Bush's team had given Ariel Sharon's government
a free hand to colonize the West Bank and Gaza, to kill, detain
and expel people at will, to demolish their homes, expropriate
their land, imprison them by curfew and hundreds of military
blockades, make life for them generally speaking impossible;
after 9/11,  Sharon simply hitched his
wagon to "the war on terrorism" and intensified his
unilateral depredations against a defenseless civilian population,
now under occupation for 36 years, despite literally tens of
UN Security Council Resolutions enjoining Israel to withdraw
and otherwise desist from its war crimes and human rights abuses.
Bush called Sharon a man of peace last June, and kept the 5 billion
dollar subsidy coming without even the vaguest hint that it was
at risk because of Israel's lawless brutality.
On October 7, 2001 Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan,
which opened with concentrated high-altitude bombing (increasingly
an "anti-terrorist" military tactic, bearing in its
effects and structure a strong resemblance to ordinary, garden
variety terrorism) and by December had installed in that devastated
country a client regime with no effective power beyond a few
streets in Kabul. There has been no significant US effort at
reconstruction, and it would seem the country has returned to
its former abjection, albeit with a noticeable return of elements
of the Taleban, as well as a thriving drug-based economy.
Since the summer of 2002, the Bush administration
has conducted an all-front campaign against the despotic government
of Iraq and, having unsuccessfully tried to push the Security
Council into compliance, began its war along with the United
Kingdom against the country. I would say that from about last
November on, dissent disappeared from a mainstream media swollen
with a surfeit of ex-generals and ex-intelligence agents sprinkled
with recent terrorism and security experts drawn from the Washington
right-wing think tanks. Anyone who spoke up and actually managed
to appear was labeled anti-American by failed academics who mounted
websites to list "enemy" scholars who didn't toe the
line. Emails of the few visible public figures who struggled
to say something were swamped, their lives threatened, their
ideas trashed and mocked by media news readers who had just become
the self-appointed, all-too-embedded sentinels of America's war.
An overwhelming torrent of crude as well
as sophisticated material appeared everywhere equating the tyranny
of Saddam Hussein not only with evil, but with every known crime:
much of this in part was factually correct but it eliminated
from mention the extraordinarily important role played by the
US and Europe in fostering the man's rise, fuelling his ruinous
wars, and maintaining his power. No less a personage than the
egregious Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in the early 80's as
a way of assuring him of US approval for his catastrophic war
against Iran. The various US corporations who supplied Iraq with
nuclear, chemical and biological material for the weapons that
we supposedly went to war for were simply erased from the public
record.
But all this and more was deliberately
obscured by both government and media in manufacturing the case
for the further destruction of Iraq which has been taking place
for the past month. The demonization of the country and its strutting
leader turned it into a simulacrum of a formidable quasi-metaphysical
threat whereas and this bears repeating its demoralized
and basically useless armed forces were a threat to no one at
all. What was formidable about Iraq was its rich culture,
its complex society, its long-suffering people: these were all
made invisible, the better to smash the country as if it were
only a den of thieves and murderers. Either without proof or
with fraudulent information Saddam was accused of harboring weapons
of mass destruction that were a direct threat to the US 7000
miles away. He was identical with the whole of Iraq, a desert
place "out there" (to this day most Americans have
no idea where Iraq is, what its history consists of, and what
besides Saddam it contains) destined for the exercise of US power
unleashed illegally as a way of cowing the entire world in its
Captain Ahab like quest for re-shaping reality and imparting
democracy to everyone. At home the Patriot and Terrorist Acts
have given the government an unseemly grip over civil life. A
dispiritingly quiescent population for the most part accepts
the bilge, passed off as fact, about imminent security threats,
with the result that preventive detention, illegal eavesdropping
and a menacing sense of a heavily policed public space have made
even the university a cold, hard place to be for anyone who tries
to think and speak independently.
The appalling consequences of the US
and British intervention in Iraq are only just beginning to unfold,
first with the coldly calculated destruction of its modern infrastructure,
then with the looting and burning of one of the world's richest
civilizations, and finally the totally cynical American attempt
to engage a band of motley "exiles" plus various large
corporations in the supposed re-building of the country and the
appropriation not only of its oil but also its modern destiny.
To the dreadful scenes of looting and burning which in the end
are the occupying power's responsibility, Rumsfeld managed to
put himself in a class beyond even Hulagu. "Freedom is untidy,"
he said on one occasion, and "stuff happens" on another.
Remorse or sorrow were nowhere in evidence.
General Jay Garner, handpicked for the
job, seems like a person straight out of the TV-serial "Dallas."
The Pentagon's favorite exile, Ahmad Chalabi, for example, has
intimated openly that he plans to sign a peace treaty with Israel,
hardly an Iraqi idea. Bechtel has already been awarded a huge
contract. This too in the name of the American people. The whole
business smacks of nothing so much as Israel's 1982 invasion
of Lebanon.
This is an almost total failure in democracy,
ours as Americans, not Iraq's. 70% of the American people are
supposed to be for all this, but nothing is more manipulative
and fraudulent than polls of random numbers of Americans who
are asked whether they "support our President and troops
in time of war." As Senator Byrd said in his speech, "there
is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions
unansweredA pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid
our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans,
even while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their
duty in Iraq." Who is going to ask questions now that that
Middle Western farm boy General Tommy Franks sits triumphantly
with his staff around one of Saddam's tables in a Baghdad palace?
I am convinced that in nearly every way,
this was a rigged, and neither a necessary nor a popular war.
The deeply reactionary Washington "research" institutions
that spawned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith and the rest provide
an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers
circulate without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring
what seems to be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious,
basically illicit policy of global domination. Hence, the doctrine
of military pre-emption, which was never voted on either by the
people of this country or their half-asleep representatives.
How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered the
government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed?
And as for planning and charting a strategic course for what
in effect is by far the most lavishly endowed military establishment
in history, one that is fully capable of dragging us into unending
conflicts, that task is left to the various ideologically based
pressure groups such as the fundamentalist Christian leaders
like Franklin Graham who have been unleashed with their Bibles
on destitute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, and such
lobbies as AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee,
along with its associated think tanks and research centers.
What seems so monumentally criminal is
that good, useful words like "democracy" and "freedom"
have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask for pillage,
muscling in on territory, and the settling of scores. The American
program for the Arab world is the same as Israel's. Along with
Syria, Iraq theoretically represents the only serious long term
military threat to Israel, and therefore it had to be put out
of commission for decades. What does it mean to liberate and
democratize a country when no one asked you to do it, and when
in the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time,
fail miserably to preserve public law and order? The mix of resentment
and relief at Saddam's cowardly disappearance that most Iraqis
feel has brought with it little understanding or compassion either
from the US or from the other Arab states, who have stood by
idly quarreling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad
burned. What a travesty of strategic planning when you assume
that "natives" will welcome your presence after you've
bombed and quarantined them for thirteen years. The truly preposterous
mindset about American beneficence, and with it that patronizing
Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the
minutest levels of the media. In a story about a 70 year old
Baghdad widow who ran a cultural center from her house
wrecked in the US raids and is now beside herself with
rage, NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises
her for having had "a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein,"
and then piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans,
"and this from a graduate of London University."
Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons
that weren't there, the Stalingrads that didn't occur, the formidable
artillery defenses that never happened, I wouldn't be surprised
if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow
to let him out with his family and money in return for the country.
The war had gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn't
risk more of the same in Baghdad. US National Security adviser
Condoleeza Rice appeared in Russia on April 7. Two days later,
Baghdad fell on April 9. Draw your own conclusions, but isn't
it possible that as a result of discussions with the Republican
Guard mentioned by Rumsfeld, Saddam bought himself out in return
for abandoning the whole thing to the Americans and their British
allies, who could then proclaim a brilliant victory.
Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have
suffered impossibly, and Bush looks like the moral equivalent
of a cowboy sheriff who has just led his righteous posse to a
victorious showdown against an evil enemy. On matters of the
gravest importance to millions of people constitutional principles
have been violated and the electorate lied to unconscionably.
We are the ones who must have our democracy back. Enough of smoke
and mirrors and smooth talking hustlers.
Today's
Features
Carl
Estabrook
Oblivious Americans: They Distort,
We Subside
Ramzy
Baroud
What Else Hasn't Israel Told America?
Steven
Sherman
About That Cuba Letter
Wayne Madsen
Bush's "Christian" Blood Cult
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