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Misinformation about Iraq
by Edward
Said
The flurry of reports,
leaks, and misinformation about the looming US war against Saddam
Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq continues unabated. It is impossible to
know, however, how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of
psychological war against Iraq, how much the public floundering of a
government uncertain about its next step. In any event, I find it as
possible to believe that there will be a war as that there will not.
Certainly the sheer belligerency of the verbal assaults on the average
citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result that very
little is totally certain about what is actually taking place. No one
can independently confirm the various troop and navy movements reported
on a daily basis, and given the lurching opacity of his thinking, George
W Bush's real intentions are difficult to read. But that the whole world
is concerned -- indeed, deeply anxious -- about the catastrophic chaos
that will ensue after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the
people of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.
And yet, one aspect of the
deluge of opinion, and a fact that is most disturbing quite on its own and
without reference to its actual intention, is the spate of articles
concerning post-Saddam Iraq. One that I'd like to discuss in particular is
obviously part of a continuing effort by an Iraqi expatriate, Kanan Makiya,
to promote himself as the father of what he calls a "non-Arab" and
decentralised post-Ba'ath country. Now it is quite clear to anyone with
the slightest concern about the travails of this rich and once-flourishing
country that the years of Ba'athist rule have been disastrous, despite the
regime's early programme of development and building. So there can be
little quarrel with trying to imagine what Iraq might look like if Saddam
is toppled either by American intervention or by internal coup. Makiya's
contribution to this effort has been a steady one, both on the airwaves
and in quality journals where he is given a platform to air his views,
about which I shall speak in a moment. What has been made less clear,
however, is who he is and from what background he emerges. I think it is
important to know these things, if only to judge the value of his
contribution and to understand more precisely the special quality of his
thoughts and ideas.
Usually identified as having a
research connection with Harvard and as a professor at Brandeis University
(both in Boston), Makiya when I knew him first in the early 1970s was
closely affiliated with the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. As I recall, he was then an architecture student at MIT, but he
hardly said anything during the occasions I saw him. Then he disappeared
from view, or rather from my view. He surfaced in 1990 as Samir Khalil,
the author of a vaunted book called The Republic of Fear that
described Saddam Hussein's rule with considerable dread and drama. One of
the media-rousing works of the first Gulf War, The Republic of Fear
seemed to have been written -- according to a fawning interview with
Makiya that appeared in the New Yorker magazine -- while Makiya
took time off from working as an associate of his father's architectural
firm in Iraq itself. He admitted in the interview that, in a sense, Saddam
had financed the writing of his book indirectly, although no one accused
Makiya of collaborating with a regime he obviously detested.
In his next book, Cruelty
and Silence, Makiya attacked Arab intellectuals whom he accused of
opportunism and immorality because they either praised various Arab
regimes or remained silent about the various governments' abuses against
their own people. Of course Makiya said nothing about his own history of
silence and complicity as a beneficiary of the Iraqi regime's munificence,
even though, of course, he was entitled to work for whomever he pleased.
But he said the vilest things about people like Mahmoud Darwish and myself
for being nationalists, allegedly supporting extremism and, in Darwish's
case, for having written an ode to Saddam. Most of what Makiya wrote in
the book was, in my opinion, revolting, based as it was on cowardly
innuendo and false interpretation, but the book, of course, enjoyed a
popular moment or two since it confirmed the view in the West that Arabs
were villainous and shabby conformists. It seemed not to matter that
Makiya himself had worked for Saddam or that he had never written anything
about the Arab regimes until his Republic of Fear, until, that is,
he was out of Iraq and done with his employment there. He was hailed here
and there in America for being a brave man of conscience and for having
defied the self-censoring practice of Arab intellectuals, but this praise
was usually heaped on Makiya by people who had no knowledge of the fact
that Makiya himself never wrote in an Arab country or that whatever meagre
writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous,
risk-free life in the West.
Except for his two books and
an article urging the US administration to occupy Baghdad during the first
Gulf War, Makiya wasn't much heard from after that. Then last year he
produced an unreadable novel proving somehow that the Dome of the Rock was
really built by a Jew; it was sent to me by the publisher, so I happened
to have skimmed it before it appeared officially, but was nevertheless
aghast at how badly written it was, and how, unable to resist showing off
how many books its author had read, it was peppered with footnotes, surely
an unusual thing for what purported to be a work of fiction. It died a
merciful death, however, and Makiya lapsed back into silence.
Until the government-inspired
campaign against Iraq broke out a few months ago Makiya had said little
about the war against terror, the events of 9/11, and the war in
Afghanistan. It is true that he did a kind of commentary for a popular
American biweekly of Mohamed Atta's supposed Islamic terrorist handbook,
but even by his standards it was a negligible performance. I vividly
recall, however, that late last summer I happened by chance to hear a
radio interview with him in which he was identified for the first time as
heading a US State Department group planning for a post-war, post-Saddam
Iraq. His name had not appeared among those mentioned as being part of the
US-funded Iraqi opposition groups, nor had he contributed anything that
could be read by a member of the general public about the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict or any other Middle Eastern issues, although
I had heard that he had visited Israel a number of times.
The most complete version of
his plans for Iraq after an American invasion that derive from his current
employment as a resident employee of the US Department of State, appears
in the November 2002 issue of Prospect, a good liberal British
monthly to which I subscribe. Makiya begins his "proposal" by enumerating
the extraordinary assumptions behind his arguments, two of which almost by
definition are unimaginable. The first is that "the unseating" of Saddam
should not occur after a bombing campaign. Makiya must have been living on
Mars to imagine that, in the event of a war, a massive bombing attack
would not occur even though every single plan circulated for regime change
in Iraq has stated explicitly that Iraq would be bombed mercilessly. The
second assumption is equally imaginative, since Makiya seems to believe
against all evidence that the US is committed to democracy and nation-
building in Iraq. Why he thinks that Iraq is like Germany and Japan after
World War II (both of which were rebuilt because of the Cold War) is
beyond me; besides, he doesn't once mention the fact that the US is
determined to bring down the Iraqi regime because of the country's oil
reserves and because Iraq is an enemy of Israel. So, he starts out by
making preposterous assumptions that simply fly in the face of all the
evidence.
Undeterred by such unimportant
considerations, he presses on. Iraqis are committed to federalism, he
says, rather than to a centralised government. The proof that he offers is
pretty negligible. Like all his other attempts to convince his reader that
he makes telling points, his logic is so weak because it is based equally
on fictional supposition and his own, highly dubious personal
affirmations. He is committed to federalism, and so he says are the Kurds.
Where federalism as a system is supposed to come from (other than from his
desk in the State Department), he doesn't bother to say. Clearly, he plans
to have it imposed from the outside, although he makes the largely
unsubstantiated claim that "everyone" is agreed that federalism in Iraq
should be the outcome. This "means devolving power away from Baghdad to
the provinces", presumably by a stroke of General Tommy Franks' pen. One
would have thought that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that
tragic country's federalism was a total success. But Makiya is so
committed to his views as a kinglike theoretician of government that he
simply ignores consequences, history, people, communities, and reality
altogether so that he can make his ludicrously improbable case. This, of
course, is exactly what the US government likes, that is, to have
miscellaneous Arab intellectuals responsible to no constituency who urge
the US military on to war while pretending to be bringing "democracy" to
the place in full contradiction of America's real aims and its actual
historical practices. Makiya seems not to have heard about ruinous US
interventions in Indochina, Afghanistan, Central America, Somalia, Sudan,
Lebanon, and the Philippines, or that the US is currently involved
militarily with about 80 countries.
The grand climax of Makiya's
justification for the invasion of Iraq by the United States is his
proposal that the new Iraq should be non-Arab. (Along the way, he speaks
contemptuously of Arab opinion which, he says, will never amount to
anything. This obviously clears the board for his airy speculations about
both the future and the past.) How this magical de-Arabising solution is
to come about, Makiya doesn't say, any more than he shows us how Iraq is
to be relieved of its Islamic identity and its military capabilities. He
refers to a mysterious alchemical quality he calls "territoriality" and
proceeds to build another sandcastle on that as the basis for a future
state of Iraq. In the end, however, he volunteers that all this is going
to be guaranteed "from the outside", by the United States. Where this has
ever taken place before is not an issue that troubles Makiya, any more
than he seems concerned about US unilateralism and needless
destructiveness.
One scarcely knows whether to
laugh or cry at Makiya's posturings. Clearly this is a man with no
recorded experience of government, or even of citizenship. Between
countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except to
his upwardly mobile career), he has now found a haven deep inside the US
government which he uses to fuel his amazingly speculative flights of
fancy. For someone who has lectured his peers about intellectual
responsibility and independent judgement, he provides examples of neither
one nor the other. Exactly the opposite. Perched on a pulpit that has
freed him from any accountability he seems now to be serving a master who
has paid him well for his services -- as Saddam employed him in the past
-- and his versatile conscience. I find it incredible that Makiya allows
himself such sanctimony and vanity, but then why shouldn't he? He has
never engaged in a public debate with any of his fellow Iraqis, never
written for an Arab audience, never put himself forward for an office or
for any political role requiring personal courage and commitment. He has
either written pseudonymously or attacked people who have had no chance to
respond to his defamations.
It is sad that Makiya
implicitly suggests that his is the voice and the example of the future
Iraq. And to think that thousands of lives have already been lost to his
patron's cruel sanctions or that many more lives and livelihoods are about
to be destroyed by electronic warfare wreaked on his country by George
Bush's government. But this man is untroubled by any of this. Devoid of
either compassion or real understanding, he prattles on for Anglo-
American audiences who seem satisfied that here at last is an Arab who
exhibits the proper respect for their power and civilisation, regardless
of what role Britain played in the imperialist partition of the Arab world
or what mischief the US dealt the Arabs through its support for Israel and
the collective Arab dictatorships.
In and of himself, Makiya is a
passing phenomenon. He is, however, a symptom of several things at once.
He represents the intellectual who serves power unquestioningly; the
greater the power, the fewer doubts he has. He is a man of vanity who has
no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering. With no
stable principles or values, he is typical of the cynical anti-Arab hawks
(like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld) who dot the Bush
administration like flies on a cake. British imperialism, Israel's brutal
occupation policies, or American arrogance do not detain him for a moment.
Worst of all, he is a man of pretension and superficiality, flattering
himself on his reasonableness even as he condemns his own people to more
travail and more dislocation. Woe to Iraq!
Source:
by courtesy & © 2002 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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