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CounterPunch
October
19, 2002
Israel, Iraq and the US
by EDWARD SAID
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 earned 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, 7 Oct). 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 as the 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, Le Monde 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, thereby slowing down and finally stopping the recourse
to war that has now become a theory and not just a practice.
Edward Said
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram.
Yesterday's Features
Lee Sustar
Bush and
Bosses Wage War on Workers
William Hughes
Israel
Takes the Hill:
The Lantos / Netanyahu Two-step
Linda Heard
Turkey
Resigned to No Win Situation
Chris Floyd
The Base
Alexander Cockburn
Starring Jimmy Carter, in War and Peace
Edward Lazarus
The Problem with Posner
Mark Weisbrot
Venezuelan Democracy Under Siege
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- How to Change the Subject: Corporate Scandal and Pension
Reform as Weapons Against Warmongering;
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Against Mining Union;
- Adios Hitchens: the Dorian Gray of Our Time;
- Object of Suspicion: How the FBI Watched Janis Ian
From Birth;
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Now Sen. John Edwards:
Another "New South" Slimeball;
- Corporate Crooks: Nature or Nurture?
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October 14,
2002
Harry Browne
Ireland:
No to War; No to Nice
Don Atapattu
The Tragedy of Alan Dershowitz
Linda Heard
So You
Think You Live in a Democracy?
Bob Feldman
Flashback: Inspecting Nuclear Israel
Adam Engel
The Anger
of Achilles
Anthony Gancarski
The
Washington Post and the Wal-Mart Way
Philip Farruggio
Sleepers
Harold Gould
Islamic
West Asia and US Foreign Policy:
A Tale of Strategic Self-Delusion
Dan Brook
An Open Letter to Barbara Lee
October 12
/ 13, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Vindication
Through Violence:
Jimmy Carter and the DC Sniper
Robert Jensen
The American
Political Paradox:
More Freedom, Less Democracy
Ben Tripp
Congratulations! It's a War!
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Red!
David Krieger
A Bleak Day for America
Anis Shivani
George W. in Therapy
Ken Paff
Where Do Hoffa's Tactics Belong in a Mob-Free Teamsters?
Carol Norris
The Politics of Fear
Elaine Cassel
The Lynne Stewart Case:
When Representing an Accused Terrorist Can Land a Lawyer in Jail
Musa AlShaer
Scenes
from an Occupied Wedding
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: a serialized
novel (Episode 3)
M. Shahid
Alam
I Will Fight Your Enemies
October 11,
2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Montana
Fusion
Steve Kelly's Wild Ride for Congress
Ralph Nader
Whirlwind
Wheelchair Intl.
Anthony Gancarski
Stayin'
Alive: Notes on Facials and Saving Face
Romi Mahajan
What
War Means to the Iraqi People
Uri Avnery
Israel:
the Jewish Demographic State?
Francis Boyle
Bush's
Banana Republic
Lee Sustar
Taft-Hartley,
Bush and the Dock Workers
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk
Syndrome and George W. Bush
Jerre Skog
The Blessings
of Growth:
The Greatest Deception of All Time
October 10,
2002
Elson E. Boles
Iraq and
Chemical Weapons:
The US Connection
Senator Russ Feingold
"Confused Justifications and
Vague Proposals": Why I Oppose Bush's War Resolution
William A.
Cook
What Bush
Didn't Tell the UN:
The Case Against Israel
Jorge Mariscal
Chicanos
and Chicanas Say:
"No a la Guerra"
Norman Madarasz
Rio's
Holiest View:
Brazilian Elections 2002
Amir Boroomand
Just
Nod, Please
Fedwa Wazwaz
Falwell,
Graham & Friedman:
Religious Extremism in America
Kurt Nimmo
Condoleezza
Rice at the Waldorf Astoria
Resources:
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About 9/11
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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