From Oslo To Iraq And The Road Map Part 8

Most important, the Initiative-which I am happy to endorse enthusiastically-puts forward the idea of a national unified authority, elected to serve the people and its need for liberation, for democratic freedoms, and for public debate and accountability. These things have been put off for far too long. The old divisions between Fateh, the Popular Front, Hamas, and all the others are meaningless today. We cannot afford such ridiculous posturing since as a people under occupation, we need a leaders.h.i.+p whose main goal is to rid us of Israeli depredations and occupations and to provide us with an order that can fulfill our needs for honesty, national scope, transparency, and direct speech. Arafat has a history of double-talk. Barghuti, on the other hand-I use him as an example here-takes a principled line, whether he addresses Palestinians, Israelis, or the foreign media. He has the respect of his people because of his medical services in the villages, and his honesty and leaders.h.i.+p have inspired everyone who has had contact with him. I also think it is very important that the Palestinian people should be led now by modern, well-educated people for whom the values of citizens.h.i.+p are central to their vision. Our rulers today have never been citizens, they have never stood in line to buy bread, they have never paid their own medical or school bills, they have never endured the uncertainty and cruelty of arbitrary arrest, tribal bullying, conspiratorial power grabs. Barghuti's and Abdel Shafi's examples, as indeed those of all the main figures in the Initiative, speak to our need for independence of mind and responsible, modern citizens.h.i.+p. The old days are over and should be buried as expeditiously as possible.

I conclude by saying that real change can come about only when people actively will that change, make it possible themselves. The Iraqi opposition is making a terrible mistake by throwing its fate into American hands and in so doing is paying insufficient attention to the needs of the actual people of Iraq, who now suffer the terrible persecutions of autocracy and are about to submit to an equally terrible bombing by the United States. In Palestine it should be possible to have elections now, not to reinstall Arafat's ragged crew, but rather to choose delegates for a const.i.tutional and truly representative a.s.sembly. It is a lamentable reality that during his ten years of misrule Arafat actively prevented the creation of a const.i.tution, despite all his ridiculous jibberish about "Palestinian democracy." His legacy is neither a const.i.tution nor even a basic law, but only a decrepit mafia. Despite that, and despite Sharon's frantic wish to bring an end to Palestinian national life, our popular and civil inst.i.tutions still function under extreme hards.h.i.+p and duress. Somehow teachers teach, nurses nurse, doctors doctor, and so on. These everyday activities have never stopped, if only because necessity dictates unstinting effort. Now those inst.i.tutions and those people who have truly served their society must bring themselves forward and provide a moral and intellectual framework for liberation and democracy, by peaceful means and with genuine national intent. In this effort, Palestinians under occupation and those in the shatat or diaspora have an equal obligation to make the effort. Perhaps this national initiative may provide a democratic example for other Arabs as well.

Al-Ahram, December 1925, 2002.

Al-Hayat, December 31, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

An Unacceptable Helplessness.

One opens the New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers and cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. Sixty-two thousand more soldiers were transferred to the Gulf last weekend. An enormous, deliberately intimidating force is being built up by America overseas, while inside the country economic and social bad news multiplies with a joint relentlessness. The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens. Nonetheless, George Bush proposes another large tax cut for the 1 percent of the population that is comparatively rich. The public education system is in a major crisis, and health insurance for 50 million Americans simply does not exist. Israel asks for $15 billion in additional loan guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment rates in the United States mount inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day.

Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue and continue without either public approval or dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalized indifference (which may conceal great overall fear, ignorance, and apprehension) has greeted the administration's warmongering and its strangely ineffective response to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no weapons of ma.s.s destruction to speak of, the United States plans a war; in the case of North Korea, it offers that country economic and energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for the North Koreans, an equally grim and cruel dictators.h.i.+p.

In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar. For almost a year American politicians, regional experts, administration officials, and journalists have repeated the charges that have become standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of this chorus predates September 11, as I have shown in my books Orientalism and Covering Islam. To today's practically unanimous chorus has been added the authority of the United Nations Human Development Report on the Arab world, which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the rest of the world in democracy, knowledge, and women's rights. Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that Islam needs reform and that the Arab educational system is a disaster, in effect, a school for religious fanatics and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams and their wealthy followers (like Usama bin Laden) but also by governments who are supposed allies of the United States. The only "good" Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab culture and society without reservation. I recall the lifeless cadences of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves or their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired American formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of print. We lack democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam enough, we need to do more about driving away the specter of Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what we, and our American instructors, say about the Arabs and Islam-vague recycled Orientalist cliches of the kind repeated by a tireless mediocrity like Bernard Lewis-is true. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic enough. "We" need to join modernity, modernity in effect being Western, globalized, free-marketed, and democratic-whatever those words might be taken to mean. (If I had the time, there would be an essay written about the prose style of people like Fouad Ajami, Fawaz Gerges, Kanan Makiya, Ghada Talhami, Mamom Fandy, et al., academics whose very language reeks of subservience, inauthenticity, and a hopelessly stilted mimicry that has been thrust upon them.) The clash of civilizations that George W. Bush and his minions are trying to fabricate as a cover for a preemptive oil and hegemony war against Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building, regime change, and forcible modernization l'americain. Never mind the bombs and the ravages of the sanctions, which are unmentioned. This will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his men and replace them with a redrawn map of the whole region. New Sykes-Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian Fourteen Points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation and perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps.

Meanwhile, the soul- and body-destroying situation in Palestine worsens all the time. There seems no force capable of stopping Sharon and Shaul Mofaz, who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we ban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an entire people continues. As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement that the entire village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area of the West Bank is about to be wiped out by sixty-ton American-made Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunams of agricultural land, a mosque, and an elementary school for 132 children. The United Nations stands by, looking on as its resolutions are flouted on an hourly basis. Typically, alas, George W. Bush identifies with Sharon, not with the sixteen-year-old Palestinian kid who is used as a human s.h.i.+eld by Israeli soldiers.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking and, presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned for ten years the first time, Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His faithful lieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press, suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or less. Remarkably, though, the great ma.s.s of these heroic people seem willing to go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going hungry, dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice of their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have done. What could be more discouraging for the average Gazan who goes on resisting Israeli occupation than to see his or her leaders kneel as supplicants before the Americans?

In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the utter pa.s.sivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The American government and its servants issue statement after statement of purpose, they move troops and material, they transport tanks and destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively can barely muster a bland refusal (at most they say, no, you cannot use military bases in our territory), only to reverse themselves a few days later.

Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness?

The largest power in history is about to launch, and is unremittingly reiterating its intention to launch, a war against a sovereign Arab country now ruled by a dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of which is not only to destroy the Ba'ath regime but to redesign the entire region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its plans are to redraw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and many borders in the process. No one can be s.h.i.+elded from the cataclysm when it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete certainty). And yet there is only long silence, followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral, in response. After all, millions of people will be affected. America contemptuously plans for their future without consulting them. Do we deserve such racist derision?

This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a region of almost 300 million Arabs wait pa.s.sively for the blows to fall without issuing a collective roar of resistance and a loud proclamation of an alternative view? Has the Arab will been completely dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last words to p.r.o.nounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of history, to a civilization about to be crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that despite its drawbacks and weaknesses nevertheless goes on functioning. Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men and women marry and work and have children, they play and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and companions.h.i.+p, friends.h.i.+p and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the business of living despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab leaders and the United States simply ignore when they fling empty gestures at the so-called "Arab street" invented by mediocre Orientalists.

But who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab governments-no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom-sit back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up, threatens, and s.h.i.+ps out more soldiers and F-16s to deliver the punch. The silence is deafening.

Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families destroyed, endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what?

This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it's a matter of what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate seriousness. Technology, modernization, and certainly globalization are not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of society and history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with great vision and moral authority, seems able now to tap into that and bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political, moral, and religious leaders can only just denounce a little bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors, they make plans somehow to ride out the storm. They think of survival and perhaps of heaven. But who is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land, the water, the air, and the lives dependent on one another for existence? No one seems to be in charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression in English that very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable helplessness, our pa.s.sivity and inability to help ourselves, now when our strength is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little left even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for extinction.

Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and try to formulate a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our world? This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although G.o.d knows that we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let us live in peace, another cringing, crawling, inaudible plea for mercy? Will no one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our future that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening.

Al-Ahram, January 1622, 2003.

Al-Hayat, January 23, 2003.

The Guardian, January 25, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY.

A Monument to Hypocrisy.

It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the United Nations into going to war, seems to me a new low point in moral hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in Munich this past weekend went the b.u.mbling Powell one further, in unctuous sermonizing and bullying derision. For the moment I shall discount George W. Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers, like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repet.i.tive monotone of their collective spokesman, Ari Fleischer. Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with G.o.d or, if not G.o.d, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state and defense seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their words and activities.

First, a few preliminaries. The United States has clearly decided on war: there seem to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take place (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states- which as usual seem to dither and be paralyzed at the same time-but by France, Russia, and Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless, to have transported 200,000 troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, leaving aside smaller deployments in Jordan, Turkey, and Israel, can mean only one thing.

Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are chicken hawks-that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney, and others of that entirely civilian group were to a man in strong favor of the Vietnam War, yet each of them got a deferment based on privilege and therefore never fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, antidemocratic in the extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks in a war with Iraq has nothing to do with actual military considerations. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to its neighbors like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could easily handle it militarily), or certainly to the United States. Any argument to the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. With a few outdated Scuds and a small amount of chemical and biological material, most of it supplied by the United States in earlier days (as Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was sold to Iraq by U.S. companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, containable, though at unconscionable immoral cost to the long-suffering civilian population. For this terrible state of affairs, I think it is absolutely true to say that there has been collusion between the Iraqi regime and the Western enforcers of the sanctions.

Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change-a process already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzes of this country-there is simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a dubious caliber actually go on blathering about bringing democracy, modernization, and liberalization to the Middle East? G.o.d knows that the area needs it, as so many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people have said over and over. But who appointed these characters as agents of progress anyway? And what ent.i.tles them to pontificate in so shameless a way when there are already so many injustices and abuses in their own country to be remedied? It's particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have been an election adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government during the period 199699, in which he counseled the renegade Israeli to sc.r.a.p any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and to try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East and does so without provoking the slightest objection from any of the media pundits who politely (abjectly) quiz him on national television.

Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its plagiarized and manufactured evidence, its confected audiotapes, and its doctored pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has violated numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical about the official U.S. position is that literally everything Powell has accused the Ba'athis of doing has been the stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal detention, a.s.sa.s.sination, a.s.saults against civilians with missiles, helicopters, and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, ma.s.s killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra, and Shatila to mention only the most obvious), denial of rights to free pa.s.sage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians for human s.h.i.+elds, humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a ma.s.s scale, destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlement, economic pauperization, attacks on hospitals, medical workers, and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses: all these, it should be noted with emphasis, have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United States, which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid but has also given the country upward of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the U.S. government on its own citizens.

This is an unconscionable record to hold against the United States and Mr. Powell as its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of U.S. foreign policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this country and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of freedom-the proclaimed central plank in American foreign policy since at least 1976-is applied uniformly, without exception or condition. How he and his bosses and coworkers can stand up before the world and righteously sermonize against Iraq while at the same time completely ignoring the ongoing American partners.h.i.+p in human rights abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet no one, in all the justified critiques of the U.S. position that have appeared since Powell made his great UN speech, has focused on this point, not even the ever-so-upright French and Germans. The Palestinian territories today are witnessing the onset of a ma.s.s famine; there is a health crisis of catastrophic proportions; there is a civilian death toll that totals at least a dozen to twenty people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move about as curfews and at least three hundred barricades impede their daily lives; and houses are blown up or bulldozed on a ma.s.s basis (sixty just yesterday). And all of it with U.S. equipment, U.S. political support, U.S. finances. Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard, is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinian lives that have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has the gall to say that he acts in G.o.d's name, and that he (and his administration) act to serve "a just and faithful G.o.d." And more astounding yet, he lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions even as he supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at least sixty-four of them on a daily basis for more than half a century.

But so craven and so ineffective are the Arab regimes today that they don't dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need U.S. economic aid. Many of them fear their own people and need U.S. support to prop up their regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the same crimes against humanity. So they say nothing and just hope and pray that the war will pa.s.s, allowing them to stay in power as they are.

But it is also a great and n.o.ble fact that for the first time since World War II, there are ma.s.s protests against the war taking place before rather than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and should become the central political fact of the new globalized era into which our world has been thrust by the United States and its superpower status. What this demonstrates is that despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and his American antagonists, despite the complicity of a ma.s.s media that has (willingly or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, and despite the indifference and ignorance of a great many people, ma.s.s action and ma.s.s protest on the basis of human community and sustainability are still formidable tools of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. But that they have at least tampered with the plans of the Was.h.i.+ngton chicken hawks and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of religious monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to lecture or speak out against these injustices, I haven't found anyone in support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to U.S. action in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan, and everywhere in the Arab world-and also to ask others to force the same linkage on everyone, Arab, American, African, European, Australian, and Asian. These are world issues, human issues, not simply strategic matters for the United States or the other major powers.

We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White House has openly announced will include 300 to 500 Cruise missiles a day (800 of them during the first forty-eight hours of the war) raining down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce "shock and awe," or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its boastful planner a certain Mr. (or is it Dr.?) Harlan Ullman has said, a Hiros.h.i.+ma-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991 Gulf War, after forty-one days of bombing Iraq, this scale of human devastation was not even approached. And the United States has six thousand "smart" missiles ready to do the job. What sort of G.o.d would want this to be a formulated and announced policy for His people? And what sort of G.o.d would claim that this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not only of Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?

These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth, it will be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals according to the Nuremberg laws that the United States itself was crucial in formulating. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the war and praise George W. Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in the name of Good? Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in protest, now and again and again. We need creative thinking and bold action to stave off the nightmares planned by a docile, professionalized staff in places like Was.h.i.+ngton and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is what they call "greater security," then words have no meaning at all in the ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon have contempt for the nonwhite people of this world is clear. The question is, how long can they keep getting away with it?

Al-Ahram, February 1319, 2003.

Al-Hayat, February 25, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE.

Who Is in Charge?.

The Bush administration's relentless unilateral march toward 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 on a world scale of any war in modern history. Before the war has even begun, more people have protested it in this country alone than did so at the height of the antiVietnam War demonstrations during the 1960s and 1970s. Note also that those rallies took place well after the war had been going on for several years: this one has yet to begin, even though of course a large number of overtly aggressive and belligerent steps have already been taken by the United States and its loyal puppy, the UK government of the increasingly ridiculous Tony Blair.

I have been criticized recently for my antiwar position by illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defense of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba'ath Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait, in 1985, when in an open conversation with the then minister of education Ha.s.san el-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 literally 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 all to no avail. I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime since it came to power in the 1970s: I never visited the place, never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernization (even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq as the main gun in the Arab a.r.s.enal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and its dreadful fascist behavior. And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of U.S. imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more later) and am therefore unable to appreciate their n.o.bility of soul! Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week after extolling President Bush's commitment to democracy, Kanan Makiya is now denouncing the United States and its plans for a post-Saddam military-Ba'ath government in Iraq. When individuals get in the habit of switching G.o.ds whom they wors.h.i.+p 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 United States 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 mobilization 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, such as it is, the Democratic Party with few exceptions has simply gone over to the president's side, in a gutless display of false patriotism. Wherever one looks in the Congress, there are tell-tale signs of either the Zionist lobby, the right-wing Christians, or the military-industrial complex, three inordinately influential minority groups who share an interest in their hostility to the Arab world, their unbridled support for extremist Zionism, and an insensate conviction that they are on the side of the angels. Every one of the 435 congressional districts in this country has a defense 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 provide a remedy, for instance, for economic recession, the almost-certain bankruptcy of the Social Security system, a mounting national debt, and a ma.s.sive failure in the public education system of this country? None whatsoever, of course, but still the party of war goes its own, unimpeded way. Demonstrations are looked at simply as a kind of degraded mob action, while the most hypocritical lies pa.s.s 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 that is designed to sound authoritative but in effect supports everything done by the United States, from the UN to the sands of Arabia. Only one major daily newspaper (in Baltimore) has published anything about U.S. eavesdropping, telephone tapping, and message intercepting of the six small countries who are members of the Security Council and whose votes are undecided about a war resolution. 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 ma.s.se 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, U.S. News & World Report, CNN, and the rest. When all these organizations mention Iraq's flouting of seventeen UN resolutions as a pretext for war, the sixty-four resolutions flouted by Israel (with U.S. support) are never mentioned, any more than the enormous human suffering of the Iraqi people during the past twelve years is 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, for instance, have for some time openly advocated Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the cessation of the Oslo process and 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 U.S. 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 a.n.a.lysis paid for by the U.S. 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, such as 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 such as Powell, Rice, Cheney, and the great G.o.d Bush himself, who know next to nothing about the Muslim or Arab world directly except through Israeli or oil company or military lenses-have any idea what a war of this magnitude against Iraq can produce by way of awful consequences for the people actually living there.

And consider, too, that the sheer unadorned hubris of men like Wolfowitz and his a.s.sistants, who are asked to testify to the largely somnolent Congress about the war's consequences and costs, has allowed them to get away without so much as the slightest concrete answer-thereby overruling or derisively dismissing the evidence of the army chief of staff, who has spoken of a military occupation force of 400,000 troops for ten years at a cost of almost $1 trillion-to such questions, thus further misleading a public that never asked for their presence in the first place.

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 unleash on a world already beleaguered by too much misery and poverty to endure any 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 as from the privacy of their fantasy worlds, who has given them the right to connive in the immiseration of millions of people whose major crime seems to be that they are Muslims and Arabs? Which American except for this small unrepresentative group is seriously interested in increasing the world's already ample anti-Americanism? Hardly any, I would suppose.

Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Al-Ahram, March 612, 2003.

Al-Hayat, March 10, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO.

A Stupid War.

Full of contradictions, flat-out lies, groundless affirmations, the clotted media torrent of reporting and commentary on the war against Iraq (which is still being waged by something called "the coalition," whereas it is an American war with some British help) has obscured what has been so criminally stupid about its planning, propaganda, and justifying discourse by military and policy experts. For the past two weeks, I have been traveling in Egypt and Lebanon trying to keep up with the unending stream of information and misinformation coming out of Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan, a lot of it misleadingly upbeat but some of it horrifyingly dramatic in its import as well of course as its immediacy. The Arab satellite channels, Al-Jazeera being by now the most notorious and efficient, have given on the whole a totally opposed view of the war than the standard stuff served up by "embedded" reporters-including speculations about Iraqis being killed for not fighting, ma.s.s uprisings in Basra, four or five "falls" of Um Kasr and Fao-who have supplied grimy pictures of themselves as lost as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with. Al-Jazeera has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad, Basra, and Nasiriya-one of them, the impressible Taysir Aloni, a fluent journalistic veteran of the Afghanistan war-and they have presented a much more detailed, on-the-spot account of the shattering realities of the heavy bombardment that has devastated Baghdad and Basra, as well as the extraordinary resistance and anger of the Iraqi population, which was supposedly to have been only a sullen bunch of people waiting to be liberated and throw flowers at Clint Eastwood look-alikes.

Let's get straight to what is so unwise and substandard about this war, leaving aside for the moment its illegality and vast unpopularity, to say nothing about the way American wars of the past half century have been lumbering, humanly unacceptable, and so utterly destructive. In the first place, no one has satisfactorily proved that Iraq possesses the weapons of ma.s.s destruction that furnish an imminent threat to the United States. No one. Iraq is a hugely weakened and subpar Third World state ruled by a hated despotic regime: there is no disagreement about that anywhere, least of all in the Arab and Islamic world. But that it is any kind of threat to anyone in its current state of siege is a laughable notion, one that no journalist of the overpaid legions who swarm around the Pentagon, State Department, and White House has ever bothered to pursue.

In theory Iraq might have been a challenge to Israel sometime in the future, since it is the only Arab country that has the human, natural, and infrastructural resources to take on not so much America's but rather Israel's arrogant brutality. This is why Menachem Begin's air force bombed Iraq preemptively in 1981. Note therefore the creeping replication of Israeli a.s.sumptions and tactics (all of them, as I shall be showing, remarkably flawed) in what the United States has been planning and implementing in its current post9/11 campaign or preemptive war. How regrettable that the media have been so timorous in not investigating the Likud's slow taking-over of U.S. military and political thinking about the Arab world. So fearful has everyone been of the charge of anti-Semitism-bandied about recklessly, even by Harvard's president-that the neoconservativec.u.m Christian rightc.u.mPentagon civilian hawks' stranglehold on American policy has become a sort of reality forcing on the entire country an att.i.tude of total belligerency and free-floating hostility. One would have thought that but for America's global dominance, we were headed for another Holocaust.

Nor, second, could it have been true by any normal human standard that Iraq's population would have welcomed the American forces that entered the country after a terrifying aerial bombardment. But that that preposterous notion became one of the linchpins of U.S. policy is testament to the outright rubbish fed the administration by the Iraqi opposition (many of whom were out of touch with their country as well as keen on promoting their postwar careers by persuading the Americans of how easy an invasion would be) and by the two accredited Orientalist experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami.

Now in his late eighties, Lewis came to the United States about thirtyfive years or so ago to teach at Princeton, where his fervent anticommunism and sarcastic disapproval of everything (except modern Turkey) about the modern Arabs and Islam pushed him to the forefront in the pro-Israel battles of the last years of the twentieth century. An old-fas.h.i.+oned Orientalist, he was quickly bypa.s.sed by advances in the social sciences and humanities that formed a new generation of scholars, who treated the Arabs and Islam as living subjects rather than as backward natives. For Lewis, vast generalizations about the whole of Islam and the civilizational backwardness of "the Arabs" were viable routes to the truth, which was available only to an expert like him. Common sense about human experience was out, whereas resounding p.r.o.nouncements about the clash of civilizations were in. (Huntington found his lucrative concept in one of Lewis's more strident essays about the "return of Islam.") A generalist and ideologue who resorted to etymology to make his points about Islam and the Arabs, Lewis found a new audience within the American Zionist lobby to whom, in journals such as Commentary and later The New York Review of Books, he addressed his tendentious pontifications that basically reinforced the prevailing negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims.

What made Lewis's work so appalling in its effects was the fact that without any other views to counter his, American policy-makers in particular fell for them. That plus the icy distance and superciliousness of his manner made Lewis an "authority," even though he hadn't entered, much less lived in, the Arab world in decades. His last book, What Went Wrong?, became a post9/11 best seller and, I am told, required reading for the U.S. military, despite its vacuousness and unsupported, usually factually incorrect, statements about the Arabs during the past five hundred years. Reading the book, you get an idea that the Arabs are a useless bunch of backward primitives, easier to attack and destroy than ever before.

Lewis also formulated the equally fraudulent thesis that there are three concentric circles in the Middle East-countries with pro-American people and governments (Jordan, Egypt, and Morocco), those with pro-American people and anti-American governments (Iraq and Iran), and those with anti-American governments and people (Syria and Libya). All of this gradually crept its way into Pentagon planning, especially as Lewis kept spewing out his simplistic formulae on television and in articles for the right-wing press. Hence Arabs wouldn't fight, they didn't know how, they would welcome us, and above all, they were totally susceptible to whatever power America could bring to bear.

Ajami is a Lebanese s.h.i.+'a educated in the United States who first made his name as a pro-Palestinian commentator. By the mid-1980s he had become a professor at Johns Hopkins and a fervent antiArab nationalist ideologue, who was quickly adopted by the right-wing Zionist lobby (he now works for people like Martin Peretz and Mort Zuckerman) and groups like the Council on Foreign Relations. He is fond of describing himself as a nonfiction V. S. Naipaul and quotes Joseph Conrad while actually sounding as hokey as Khalil Gibran. In addition, Ajami has a penchant for catchy one-liners, ideally suited for television if not for reflective thought. The author of two or three ill-informed and tendentious books, he has become influential because as a "native informant" he can harangue TV viewers with his venom while demoting the Arabs to the status of subhuman creatures whose world and actuality don't matter to anyone. Ten years ago he started deploying "we" as a righteous imperial collectivity that, along with Israel, never does anything wrong. Arabs are to blame for everything and therefore deserve "our" contempt and hostility.

Iraq has drawn out his special venom. He was an early advocate of the 1991 war and has, I think, deliberately misled the basically ignorant American strategic mind into believing that "our" power can set things straight. d.i.c.k Cheney quoted him in a major speech last August as saying that Iraqis would welcome "us" as liberators in "the streets of Basra," which still fights on as I write. Like Lewis, Ajami hasn't been a resident of the Arab world for years, although he is rumored to be close to the Saudis, of whom he has reasonably spoken as models for the Arab world's future governance.

If Ajami and Lewis are the leading intellectual figures in U.S. Middle East planning, one can only wince at how even more ba.n.a.l and weak-minded policy hacks in the Pentagon and White House have spun out such "ideas" into the scenario for a quick romp in a friendly Iraq. The State Department, after a long Zionist campaign against its so-called "Arabists," is purged of any countervailing views, and Colin Powell, it should be remembered, is little more than a dutiful servant of power. So because of its potential for anti-Israel troublemaking, Saddam's Iraq was targeted for military and political termination, quite irrespective of its history, its complicated society, its internal dynamics, and its contradictions. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle said exactly that when they were consultants to Benjamin Netanyahu's 1996 election campaign. Saddam Hussein is of course an awful tyrant, but it isn't as if, for instance, most Iraqis haven't suffered terribly due to the U.S. sanctions and are willing to accept more punishment on the off chance that they will be "liberated." After such liberation, what forgiveness? After all, look at the war against Afghanistan, which also featured bombing and peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches. Yes, Hamid Karzai is now in power of a very iffy kind, but the Taliban, the Pakistani secret services, and the poppy fields are all back, as are the warlords. Hardly a brilliant blueprint to follow in Iraq, which doesn't resemble Afghanistan very much anyway.

The expatriate Iraqi opposition has always been a motley bunch. Its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, is a brilliant man now wanted for embezzlement in Jordan and without a real const.i.tuency beyond Paul Wolfowitz's Pentagon office. He and his helpers (e.g., the thoroughly shabby Kanan Makiya, who has said that the merciless high-alt.i.tude U.S. bombing of his native land is "music to my ears"), plus a few ex-Ba'athists, s.h.i.+'a clerics, and others have also sold the U.S. administration a bill of goods about quick wars, deserting soldiers, and cheering crowds, equally unsupported by evidence or lived experience. One can't, of course, fault these people for wanting to rid the world of Saddam Hussein: we'd all be better off without him. The problem has been the falsifying of reality and the creation of either ideological or metaphysical scenarios that basically ignorant and unchecked American policy planners would foist undemocratically on a fundamentalist president and a largely misinformed public. In all, this Iraq might as well have been the moon and the Pentagon and White House Swift's Academy of Lagado.

Other racist premises underlying the campaign in Iraq are such thought-stopping propositions as redrawing the Middle East map and setting in motion a "domino effect" in bringing democracy there, as well as the a.s.sumption that the Iraqi people const.i.tute a kind of tabula rasa on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and other far-right deep thinkers. As I have said in an earlier article, such ideas were first tried out by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then again in Palestine since he took office two years ago. There's been lots of destruction but little else in security and peace and subaltern compliance to show for it. Never mind: well-trained U.S. special forces have practiced and perfected the storming of civilian homes with Israeli soldiers in Jenin. It is hard to believe, as the ill-conceived Iraq war advances, that things will be much different than that b.l.o.o.d.y episode, but with other countries like Syria and Iran involved, shaky regimes shaken more, and general Arab outrage inflamed to the boiling point, one cannot imagine that victory in Iraq will resemble any of the simple-minded myths posited by Bush and his little clique.

But what is truly puzzling is that the regnant American ideology is still undergirded by the view that U.S. power is fundamentally benign and altruistic. This surely accounts for the outrage expressed by U.S. pundits and officials that Iraqis had the gall to undertake resistance at all, or that when captured, U.S. soldiers were exhibited on Iraqi TV. The practice is much worse than (a) bombing markets and whole cities, and (b) showing rows of Iraqi prisoners made to kneel or lie spread-eagled facedown in the sand. All of a sudden the Geneva conventions are involved not for Camp X-Ray but for Saddam, and when his forces hide inside cities, that is cheating, whereas carpet bombing from thirty thousand feet is playing fair.

This is the stupidest and most recklessly undertaken war in modern times. It is all about imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in brutal violence and cruel electronic gadgetry. To call it "faith-based" is to give faith an even worse name than it already has. With its too-long and vulnerable supply lines, its lurching from illiterate glibness to blind military pounding, its poorly planned logistical inadequacy, and its slick wordy self-explanations, the U.S. war against Iraq is almost perfectly embodied by poor George W. Bush's groping to stay on cue and on top of the texts they've prepared for him, which he can scarcely read, and Rummy Rumsfeld's wordy petulance, sending out lots of young soldiers either to die or to kill as many people as possible. What winning, or for that matter losing, such a war will ultimately entail is almost literally unthinkable. But pity the Iraqi civilians who must still suffer a great deal more before they are finally "liberated."

Al-Hayat, April 14, 2003.

London Review of Books, April 17, 2003.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE.

What Is Happening to the United States?.

In a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate floor on March 19, 2003, 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 U.S. 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, and 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 thirty-six 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 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-alt.i.tude bombing (increasingly an "ant.i.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 U.S. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton right-wing think tanks. Anyone who spoke up against the war 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 United States and Europe in fostering the man's rise, fueling his ruinous wars, and maintaining his power. No less a personage than the egregious Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in the early 1980s as a way of a.s.suring him of U.S. approval for his catastrophic war against Iran. The various U.S. 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 ma.s.s destruction that were a direct threat to the United States, seven thousand 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 U.S. power unleashed illegally as a way of cowing the entire world in its Captain Ahablike quest for reshaping reality and imparting democracy to everyone. At home the Patriot and Anti-Terrorism Acts have given the government an unseemly grip over civil life. A dispiritingly quiescent population for the most part accepts the bilge, pa.s.sed off as fact, about imminent security threats, with the result that preventive detention, illegal eavesdropping, and a menacing sense of a heavily policed public s.p.a.ce 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 U.S. 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 with 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 of its modern destiny. In response to the dreadful scenes of looting and burning that in the end are the occupying power's responsibility, Rumsfeld managed to put himself in a cla.s.s beyond even Hulagu, the thirteenth-century Mongol ruler who sacked Baghdad and destroyed its library, throwing its contents into the Tigris. "Freedom is untidy," he said on one occasion, and, "Stuff happens," on another. Remorse or sorrow were nowhere in evidence.

General Jay Garner, hand-picked for the job, seems like a person straight out of the TV series 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. Seventy percent 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 midwestern farm boy General Tommy Franks sits triumphantly with his staff around one of Saddam's tables in a Baghdad palace?