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Who is in charge?
by Edward
Said
The Bush administration's
relentless unilateral march towards war is profoundly disturbing for
many reasons, but so far as American citizens are concerned the whole
grotesque show is a tremendous failure in democracy. An immensely
wealthy and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of
individuals, all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public
pressure, and simply turned on its head. It is no exaggeration to say
that this war is the most unpopular in modern history. Before the war
has begun there have been more people protesting it in this country
alone than was the case at the height of the anti- Vietnam war
demonstrations during the 60s and 70s. Note also that those rallies took
place after the war had been going on for several years: this one has
yet to begin, even though a large number of overtly aggressive and
belligerent steps have already been taken by the US and its loyal puppy,
the UK government of the increasingly ridiculous Tony Blair.
I have been criticised
recently for my anti-war position by illiterates who claim that what I say
is an implied defence of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my
Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba'athi
Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait in 1985, when in an open
conversation with the then Minister of Education Hassan Al-Ibrahim I
accused him and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their
financial support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud
to have committed billions of dollars to Saddam's war against "the
Persians", as they were then contemptuously called, and that it was a more
important struggle than someone like me could comprehend. I remember
clearly warning those Kuwaiti acolytes of Saddam Hussein about him and his
ill will against Kuwait, but to no avail. I have been a public opponent of
the Iraqi regime since it came to power in the 70s: I never visited the
place, never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernisation
(even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq
as the main gun in the Arab arsenal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I
thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and fascist
behaviour. And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of
certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of US
imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy
(about which more later), and am therefore unable to appreciate their
nobility of soul. Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week
after extolling President Bush's commitment to democracy Professor Makiya
is now denouncing the US and its plans for a post-Saddam military-Ba'athi
government in Iraq. When individuals get in the habit of switching the
gods whom they worship politically there's no end to the number of changes
they make before they finally come to rest in utter disgrace and well
deserved oblivion.
But to return to the US and
its current actions. In all my encounters and travels I have yet to meet a
person who is for the war. Even worse, most Americans now feel that this
mobilisation has already gone too far to stop, and that we are on the
verge of a disaster for the country. Consider first of all that the
Democratic Party, with few exceptions, has simply gone over to the
president's side in a gutless display of false patriotism. Wherever you
look in the Congress there are the tell-tale signs either of the Zionist
lobby, the right-wing Christians, or the military-industrial complex,
three inordinately influential minority groups who share hostility to the
Arab world, unbridled support for extremist Zionism, and an insensate
conviction that they are on the side of the angels. Every one of the 500
congressional districts in this country has a defence industry in it, so
that war has been turned into a matter of jobs, not of security. But, one
might well ask, how does running an unbelievably expensive war remedy, for
instance, economic recession, the almost certain bankruptcy of the social
security system, a mounting national debt, and a massive failure in public
education? Demonstrations are looked at simply as a kind of degraded mob
action, while the most hypocritical lies pass for absolute truth, without
criticism and without objection.
The media has simply become a
branch of the war effort. What has entirely disappeared from television is
anything remotely resembling a consistently dissenting voice. Every major
channel now employs retired generals, former CIA agents, terrorism experts
and known neoconservatives as "consultants" who speak a revolting jargon
designed to sound authoritative but in effect supporting everything done
by the US, from the UN to the sands of Arabia. Only one major daily
newspaper (in Baltimore) has published anything about US eavesdropping,
telephone tapping and message interception of the six small countries that
are members of the Security Council and whose votes are undecided. There
are no antiwar voices to read or hear in any of the major medias of this
country, no Arabs or Muslims (who have been consigned en masse to the
ranks of the fanatics and terrorists of this world), no critics of Israel,
not on Public Broadcasting, not in The New York Times, the New
Yorker, US News and World Report, CNN and the rest. When
these organisations mention Iraq's flouting of 17 UN resolutions as a
pretext for war, the 64 resolutions flouted by Israel (with US support)
are never mentioned. Nor is the enormous human suffering of the Iraqi
people during the past 12 years mentioned. Whatever the dreaded Saddam has
done Israel and Sharon have also done with American support, yet no one
says anything about the latter while fulminating about the former. This
makes a total mockery of taunts by Bush and others that the UN should
abide by its own resolutions.
The American people have thus
been deliberately lied to, their interests cynically misrepresented and
misreported, the real aims and intentions of this private war of Bush the
son and his junta concealed with complete arrogance. Never mind that
Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle, all of them unelected officials who work for
unelected Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, have for some time openly
advocated Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the cessation
of the Oslo process, have called for war against Iraq (and later Iran),
and the building of more illegal Israeli settlements in their capacity
(during Netanyahu's successful campaign for prime minister in 1996) as
private consultants to him, and that that has become US policy now.
Never mind that Israel's
iniquitous policies against Palestinians, which are reported only at the
ends of articles (when they are reported at all) as so many miscellaneous
civilian deaths, are never compared with Saddam's crimes, which they match
or in some cases exceed, all of them, in the final analysis, paid for by
the US taxpayer without consultation or approval. Over 40,000 Palestinians
have been wounded seriously in the last two years, and about 2,500 killed
wantonly by Israeli soldiers who are instructed to humiliate and punish an
entire people during what has become the longest military occupation in
modern history.
Never mind that not a single
critical Arab or Muslim voice has been seen or heard on the major American
media, liberal, moderate, or reactionary, with any regularity at all since
the preparations for war have gone into their final phase. Consider also
that none of the major planners of this war, certainly not the so-called
experts like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, neither of whom has so much as
lived in or come near the Arab world in decades, nor the military and
political people like Powell, Rice, Cheney, or the great god Bush himself,
know anything about the Muslim or Arab worlds beyond what they see through
Israeli or oil company or military lenses, and therefore have no idea what
a war of this magnitude against Iraq will produce for the people actually
living there.
And consider too the sheer,
unadorned hubris of men like Wolfowitz and his assistants. Asked to
testify to a largely somnolent Congress about the war's consequences and
costs they are allowed to escape without giving any concrete answers,
which effectively dismisses the evidence of the army chief of staff who
has spoken of a military occupation force of 400,000 troops for 10 years
at a cost of almost a trillion dollars.
Democracy traduced and
betrayed, democracy celebrated but in fact humiliated and trampled on by a
tiny group of men who have simply taken charge of this republic as if it
were nothing more than, what, an Arab country? It is right to ask who is
in charge since clearly the people of the United States are not properly
represented by the war this administration is about to loose on a world
already beleaguered by too much misery and poverty to endure more. And
Americans have been badly served by a media controlled essentially by a
tiny group of men who edit out anything that might cause the government
the slightest concern or worry. As for the demagogues and servile
intellectuals who talk about war from the privacy of their fantasy worlds,
who gave them the right to connive in the immiseration of millions of
people whose major crime seems to be that they are Muslims and Arabs? What
American, except for this small unrepresentative group, is seriously
interested in increasing the world's already ample stores of
anti-Americanism? Hardly any I would suppose.
Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst
be living at this hour.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2003 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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