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What is happening to the United States?
by Edward
Said
In a scarcely reported
speech given on the Senate floor on 19 March, 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 11 September, Bush's
team had given Ariel Sharon's government a free hand to colonise 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 five billion dollar subsidy coming
without even the vaguest hint that it was at risk because of Israel's
lawless brutality.
On 7 October, 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 Taliban, 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 Web sites to list "enemy"
scholars who didn't toe the line. E-mails 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 80s 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 demonisation of the country and its strutting leader
turned it into a simulacrum of a formidable quasi-metaphysical threat
whereas -- and this bears repeating -- its demoralised 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 reshaping 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
civilisations, and finally the totally cynical American attempt to engage
a band of motley "exiles" plus various large corporations in the supposed
rebuilding of the country and the appropriation not only of its oil but
also its modern destiny. In response 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 Al-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. Seventy per cent 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 unanswered...A 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 preemption, 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
centres.
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 programme 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 democratise 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 13 years. The truly preposterous
mindset about American beneficence, and with it that patronising
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 centre 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. On April 6 a Russian convoy left Baghdad. US National
Security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared in Russia on 7 April. Two days
later, Baghdad fell on 9 April. 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.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2003 Al-Ahram weekly & Edward Said
by the same author:
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