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May
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May
14, 2003
The Longer View
Conundrums of
a Civilizing Mission
By M. JUNAID ALAM
Or are they too spellbound by their narrowly
conceived selfish interests, too blinded by their hatred of progress,
grown so senile in these latter days of the capitalist age, as
to commit suicide out of fear of death?
--Paul Baran, The Longer View
Part One: A Diagnosis
Iraq has been set aflame.
For the past twenty years, the soil of
this nation of twenty-four million was sprinkled with the kerosene
of American benevolence. The citadel of civilization first donated
to the people of Iraq the gift of Saddam Hussein, financing and
arming him with chemical and biological weapons for a decade;
then it utterly decimated the nation's civilian infrastructure
in war and stood by silently while the still-reigning despot
crushed ethnic revolts in the aftermath; later it held millions
of women and children hostage to a most cruel set of devastating
post-war economic sanctions, killing at least 500,000 young sons
and daughters of this Arab nation. These are America's previous
contributions to Iraq, the last liters of kerosene-coated kindness
to be spilled before setting Iraq ablaze in a final act of generosity-a
campaign of Shock and Awe, of military invasion and colonial
rule.
But in the embers and ashes of war, in
the smoke which rises from the rubble of the plundered and pillaged,
in the stench that haunts the corpses of the burned and bombed,
the ominous voice of death and destruction now whispers only
one word: liberation. Indeed, the mantra of liberation
has been heralded by the leading luminaries of the war campaign;
by the great humanitarian Donald Rumsfeld, who spoke of the care
and concern poured into each American cruise missile destined
for Iraq, by the nuanced philosopher George W. Bush, who describes
his wars as crusades and neatly apportions the world into good
and evil, and by the short-term emperor of Iraq, General Jay
Garner, who heaped lavish praise upon Israel for its restraint
in mowing down only a few hundred dispossessed Palestinians in
two months time.
The cynical and opportunistic invocation of Iraq's suffering
as a pretext for waging war of 'liberation' upon it has produced
the desired effect on some of the war's doubters. As America
puts its final touches on the military masterpiece dubbed 'Operation
Iraqi Freedom', many now marvel at the achievement, dropping
all pretenses to opposing the war and citing the gods of Inevitability
and Pragmatism. Large sections of the American Left lie impotent,
gripped by the paralysis of theoretical poverty.
Many had embraced slogans surrendering
ground to the Right, with variations on 'Support Our Troops'
a rather dubious sentiment when 'our troops' were unleashing
cluster bombs on cities and spraying machine gun fire on civilians.
Others appealed in vain to the United Nations, that discarded
carcass torn apart by an openly aggressive administration unconcerned
with false formalities. Still others hoped for a more determined
resistance by Iraq's army to dampen American enthusiasm for conquest,
but that wish was left smoldering in the wreckage of Iraqi armor
as its officers fled, capitulated, and collaborated with the
invasion force. None of these sentiments, at any rate, could
halt the American advance towards Baghdad, nor could they offer
any explanatory power once the images of US tanks in the capital,
cheering Iraqis, and falling statues of Saddam poured onto television
screens as rapidly as wine flowed into the cups of ebullient
hawks.
The victory celebration of the Right
is, in fact, altogether premature-but few on the American Left
seem to grasp the full implications of the present period. For
wide sections of the Left the order of the day now appears to
be mourning and grieving for Iraq and preparing the appropriate
epitaphs: the war was unjustified because, after all, no one
can seem to find the much-coveted weapons of mass destruction-but
the whole production is now 'over' anyway. The neoconservative
agenda is met with contempt, derision-and, now that it is underway-even
fear among anti-war activists, but apart from warnings of destabilization
and terrorism the full dimensions and consequences of the doctrine
itself have gone unexamined. Above all, the general sense in
some quarters of the anti-war Left in particular is that
'we have lost' and 'they have won'.
It must be stated from the outset that
such sentiments illustrate a serious misreading of the scope
and scale of the administration's overall program-a consequence
of having ceded too much space to the Right, of having failed
to draw attention to the inextricable ties between war and capitalism,
between past and present, for fear of offending the powers that
be and angering the 'moderates'. In this context it must also
be said-with that degree of bluntness required to sharpen our
understanding-that the 'moderate' position is bankrupt. A position
which scurries away in horror from such dreadfully impolite terms
as 'imperialism' and 'Zionism', which fawns at every opportunity
to assure the concerned parties that we too support the overall
'war on terror', we too can wave American flags at rallies like
true 'patriots', we too support occupation so long as it is 'multilateral',
renders any so-called commitments to peace and justice utterly
hollow, as funeral rites for our futures to be intoned at appropriately
solemn processions led by the proper authorities of certain 'Left'
circles-already shedding their mourning veils for more militant
apparel to fulfill the heroic task of condemning cornered Cuba
at the apex of American empire.
This woeful method of 'opposition' traps
the movement within the preconceived parameters of pro-war discourse,
and, in connection, ties it to the pro-war paranoia to which
it comes to accommodate itself and is ultimately seduced by.
Concrete political analysis is swept aside in a flurry of framed
interrogations about 'patriotism', 'pro-Saddamism', 'anti-Americanism',
and 'anti-Semitism'. A movement that fails to challenge the ideological
noose thrown around its neck is bound to be hanged. In order
to effectively combat and expose the claim of 'liberation' it
is necessary to go outside the imposed boundaries of mainstream
discourse, to 'offend' and 'anger'-to 'shock and awe'-the appointed
authors of cheap lies providing the rationale for re-colonizing
the Middle East.
The military conquest of Iraq has removed
Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party from the heights of power
it once commanded, and has allowed for the most direct and forceful
projection of American power in the region to date. To interpret
this development as the beginning of liberation for Iraq in particular
and the Arabs in general is to make a mockery of history. For
it so happens that even the briefest glance of the historical
record reveals the foreign policy of the United States government
as one not smothered in goodwill but soaked in foreign blood.
Consider the period of war between Iraq
and Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution: operating on
the principle espoused by Henry Kissinger that, one, "it's
best to let them kill each other off," and two, "oil
is too valuable a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs,"
the US government, through special envoy Donald Rumsfeld, normalized
relations with Saddam Hussein in preparation for a massive exportation
of arms and equipment.(1) For the next ten years, a total of
twenty-four private US corporations supplied Saddam with a total
of over $1.5 billion dollars of chemical, biological and conventional
weapons, including Sarin, Tabun, and VX gas.(2) No one was shedding
tears in Washington when these weapons were used with devastating
effect against Kurds in the 1988 Halabja massacre which left
thousands dead; one victim recently interviewed by Western media
said, ""I don't trust Britain or America at all,"
adding, "they have said nothing about our plight due to
the gases for 15 years. They even supported Saddam then."(3)
Consider also the period following Gulf
War I, when America imposed a severe set of sanctions on Iraq,
depriving it of even basic civilian and medical necessities on
the basis that they might hold military value. The list of banned
goods included chemotherapy drugs, blood bags, painkillers, pencils,
analgesics, and chlorine. The sanctions reinforced the power
of Saddam in Iraq as they targeted and decimated the civilian
population. Two UN heads who oversaw the Iraqi oil-for-food program-and
who resigned in succession out of disgust-estimated that about
500,000 children under five were killed as a direct result of
the sanctions regime in ten years, with one million dead overall;
both of them termed it "genocide".(4) America took
a more sanguine view of its policy: asked if troubled by the
death of 500,000 Iraqi children in 1996, the Secretary of State
announced that "the price was worth it."
What the thousands of families who were
forced to bury their children prematurely learned-and what some
'liberals' have forgotten-is that American imperialism is predicated
not upon the diffusion of 'democratic values' but the pursuit
of crushing power. Few understood this better than the planners
who set the framework for maintaining American hegemony at the
end of World War II, among them George Kennan of the State Department,
who wrote in 1948 that "we have about 50% of the world's
wealth, but only 6.3% of its populationOur real task in the coming
period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit
us to maintain this position of disparity....we will have to
dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreamingwe should cease
to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights,
the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The
day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight
power concepts." (5)
Victims of such "straight power
concepts" can be found on every continent, be they in Chile,
Greece, Indonesia, Congo, or Vietnam; wherever nationalist demands
for self-determination and economic independence from the wrathful
reach of American capital gained strength, they were met with
swift repression through direct military force or brutal right-wing
proxy regimes. Today's preachers of 'liberation' in the Middle
East are members of the same sanctimonious Church whose members
held no qualms about training death squads, funding secret police,
and dropping napalm when it suited the god of capital during-and
still after-the Cold War era. And in the singing choir of this
holy abode of American imperialism, one also notices no shortage
of repressive pawns and puppets comprising the regimes of Saudi
Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, who maintain their power thanks to
the generosity of American financial aid. What is the sole function
of these ossified apparatuses, but to crush, beat, and torture
the opposition of the 'Arab street' which seethes in anger at
American policies in the region?
Now that the military conquest of Iraq
has been torn from its illusory context of imperial benevolence
and placed against the proper historical backdrop of American
support for repressive elites whose task is to quell Third World
resistance, the scene becomes far clearer. For the destruction
of Saddam's army and arrival of American armor in Iraq is not
a first step of liberation, but merely an introduction of new
methods to fulfill and expand upon old purposes. The Ba'athists,
who were brought to power in 1968 with the assistance of American
intelligence (which also kindly supplied them a list of thousands
of suspected Communists and Kurds to be summarily executed) became
disposable by virtue of disobedience; the heresy of the
regime was not that it was brutal and bloody-indeed, from the
US point of view, these were among its assets-but that, after
1990, it acted against American interests. Thus the imperial
minister, having now swept away its unruly minions, seeks to
take on the role of robbing the Iraqi people firsthand.
Perhaps this assessment sounds too harsh,
too unforgiving-too 'radical'. Here it is useful to turn attention
to the words of the American war planners themselves. The military
planners of Shock and Awe: Rapid Dominance leave no room
for confusion: "The intent here is to impose a regime of
Shock and Awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible
levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society
writ large," for the weapons of war are to be employed "against
society and its values" and "directed at the public
will of the adversary." The only remaining question, the
planners go on, is if it is possible "to destroy quickly
the will to resist within acceptable and probably unachievably
low levels of societal destruction."(6)
This program dovetails nicely with the
neoconservative doctrine of 'total war', in which, according
to its espousers, "the sparing of civilians cannot be [the]
first priority," for "total war pits nation against
nation, and even culture against culture." The reason for
this is clear enough: total war is one that "not only destroys
the enemy's military forces, but also brings the enemy society
to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are
willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned
the war in the first place." Ultimately, we are informed,
the goal of 'total war' is "to permanently force your will
onto another people group."(7)
Let the Left take heed: here lies exposed
the hatred, racism, and arrogance of American imperialism shorn
of all its sentimental and pseudo-moralistic trappings; hind
legs poised, fangs bristling, claws bared, there can be no doubt
as to the nature of this particular beast. The task of soothing
the populace with fairy tales about the 'honest intentions' behind
this colonial venture may well be left to the servile satrapies
of the propaganda and power structures, but already at this relatively
early stage we can discern the broad outlines of the 'total war'
strategy from unfolding events in Iraq.
Part Two: The
First Signs of Liberation
Let us begin our examination at the precise
point at which American democracy directly touched the citizens
of Iraq-that is, when American bombs began liberating Iraqis
from their limbs and lives. For this purpose a brief sampling
of evidence should suffice. March 31st: AFP reports that
in Janabiyah, "Bloodied school books and children's shoes
lie amidst animal carcasses on the road leading to the Ismails'
farm" leaving 20 civilians dead, 11 of them children. One
survivor recalls that "five children were turned into human
torches;" another says, missile debris in hand, "That
is Bush's democracy. They want us to welcome them with flowers.
Look what they've done to our families." April 4th: Canadian
Press cites Red Cross doctors in Hillah telling of "an
incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds,"
and of "a truck [that] was delivering dozens of totally
dismembered dead bodies of women and children." 400 people
had been taken to the local hospital in two days. April 12th:
The Independent tells the story of a 12 year-old in Baghdad
whose father and pregnant mother was killed by bombing and whose
arms had to be amputated, and of an 11 year-old who "has
lost his left arm, half his face is hidden by bandages and he
may lose one of his eyes." His father asks: "What is
the justification in bombing ordinary people?" Rumsfeld
was not on hand to answer.
April 15th: Knight Ridder newswire
reports "five unexploded American-made cluster bomblets"
in a Baghdad neighborhood complete with "fallen walls, collapsed
roofs and smashed cars riddled with bullet holes." Locals
fumed, "Look what they have done to usEveryone here now
wants to kill Americans." Nearby four civilians were killed
and witnesses told of a 10 year-old boy shot and 13 other civilians
killed at the mosque; the local sheikh offers a tour of the bullet-riddled
mosque, commenting, "This is now inside our hearts and will
never leavewe hate the Americans." April 17th: Humans
Rights Watch demands an inquiry for the US "using [of]
cluster bombs in populated areas of Baghdad." April 18th:
Washington Post reports from Najaf: "Ali Khadim Subhi
walked today along a row of 10 coffins allocated to the corpses
who were once his family," all killed in an air raid. At
the local cemetery, "over the past week, each of the six
workers was washing 45 bodies a day. Other spoke of hundreds,
even thousands, being buried from dawn to dusk." Mourning
and grieving, a brother of one Shiite man killed declared, "We
don't want the Americans. We don't want their freedom. The Americans
killed him."
It is not clear precisely how many Iraqi
civilians were sacrificed at the altar of American imperialism
over the course of the war. We can nevertheless comfort ourselves
with the reassuring fact that no one in Washington is interested
in "doing body counts" of the Iraqis, military or civilian.
Such tasks are beneath the honor of empire. But this is not all:
for it would be very naïve to assume that the project of
'total war' reached an end with the closing of major military
operations-the task of striking fear into the heart of the backward
Arab has in fact only begun.
For once the debris of the old regime
was swept aside by American military might, the new occupiers
of Iraq first presided over a mass looting and plundering campaign
conducted across the capital and other major cities, one which
they made no attempt to prevent. Mobs, unimpeded by idle US soldiers
stationed nearby, looted and ransacked public government offices,
private homes, and even hospitals, forcing medical personnel
to arm themselves and erect barricades. The scene in some areas
was desperate: within 48 hours of liberation, "men with
Kalashnikovs dragged drivers from their cars at gunpoint, babies
were killed by cluster bombs, and hospitals," overflowing
with "badly rotted" and "stinking corpses"
-courtesy of American tank shells and cluster bombs-were "transformed
into visions of hell."(8) At one makeshift mortuary an Iraqi
disturbed at apparent American indifference asked, "Why
are they allowing robbing, why are they allowing people to set
fire to buildings?" Faculty at Nasariya's Technical Institute
who tried to defend the school from looters recalled that patrolling
US forces not only refused to help but in fact openly encouraged
the looters: "I saw with my own eyesThe Americans waved
bye-bye and the looters were clappingwhen one man came out with
an air condition an American said to him, 'Good, very good.'"(9)
The most humiliating scene, however,
was at the Ministry of Antiquities, where Iraq's museums were
gutted and ransacked by unchecked looters. American promises
to protect Iraq's valuable antiquities went unfulfilled, allowing
professional art thieves to run off with prized artifacts. A
museum director told the press, "This is what the Americans
wanted. They wanted Iraq to lose its history."(10) Thus
one of the first achievements of America's civilizing mission
was the destruction of priceless valuables reflecting thousands
of years of Mesopotamian civilization: a priceless example of
the neoconservative concept of 'creative destruction' at work.
This project has its natural limits,
of course: the Iraqi oil ministry, "still under heavy
guard" by American forces, Reuters informs us, "is
the only government building that survived looting that swept
the capital."(11) The Iraqi people can also rest assured
that even though they have no functioning government, America
and Israel have already begun plans to resurrect an oil pipeline
from Mosul to the Israeli port of Haifa, fulfilling what a senior
ex-CIA official said "has long been a dream of a powerful
section of the people now driving this administration."(12)
The priorities of the new occupier reflected in incidents such
as these do not, of course, call into question that unassailable
mountain of 'Western values', which Iraqi heathens will learn
to look up to with proper reverence and awe in due time.
But until that time arrives, it is necessary
to put the natives in their proper place: after military bombardment
and national humiliation, the third phase of the civilizing mission
is necessarily one of containment. As early as April 11th, with
Baghdad's government buildings set ablaze and residents blockading
streets to drive off looters, US troops manning checkpoints opened
fire on a car, killing four civilians and wounded a five-year-old
girl.(13) On April 15th, US troops shot and killed ten Iraqis
in Mosul where, like 20,000 Iraqis in Nasiriyah on the same day,
people chanted, "No to America, No to Saddam" and children
threw stones at soldiers.(14) On April 19th, tens of thousands
across the country took to the streets to protest the American
occupation, with banners reading "Leave our country"
and "No to America"; all three major denominations
in Baghdad -Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Shiite Muslim-failed
to follow the administration's script, threatening resistance
to any long-term presence of US troops.(15)
By April 23rd, the overwhelmingly poor
Shiites in the city of Baghdad "converged like to rivers
flowing from opposite directions" to protest the American
detention of a cleric; when a Chalabi follower emerged to inform
the crowd-now faced with Bradley machine guns-that the cleric
had been freed, the people soon began denouncing Chalabi as well.(16)
And by April 25th, a critical situation had developed in Kut,
as half the city's American-assigned police officers quit after
"local people warned them that only traitors collaborated
with America." The police station itself was burned to the
ground, while US troops began to arm themselves with anti-rioting
equipment. In the preceding two days in the city, a crowd of
hundreds blockaded a US Humvee convoy and a 25 year-old demonstrating
in front of bulldozers was shot and killed.(17)
13 more Iraqis, among them three young
boys, shared the same fate on April 29th, when American troops
gunned down protesters at a rally in Fallujah, injuring scores
of others. Hundreds of schoolboys "shook their shoes at
the soldiers" and "pelted them with stones and yelled
in English, 'Down USA!'".(18) The response was swift: a
day later in the same city, US forces killed two more protesters.
Two British journalists on the scene reported that US troops
opened fire without warning on the crowd of unarmed men and boys
when a child threw a shoe at an armored vehicle.(19) An American
officer's explanation was appropriately pathetic: "The evil-doers
are deliberately placing at risk the good civilians."(20)
Let him understand who can.
Every shot fired against a people seeking
to defend their nation's integrity from foreign dominance, every
blood-stained bullet that finds its way into the flesh of an
Iraqi protesting occupation, is imperialism's warning to all
those who resist submitting to absolute power; it is also a reminder
to our movement of the necessity of resisting that power
and exposing its predatory nature with unrelenting criticism
and unyielding pressure.
Part Three: Uncivilized
Exponents of the Civilizing Mission
To bring such criticism and pressure
to bear, however, it is first necessary to know who is
brandishing the dagger of absolute power and for what other
purposes its blade has been sharpened. To this end it is
only fitting to begin with the aforementioned scenes of military
occupation now prevailing in Iraq. For no one who is aware of
that other war in the Middle East, of the suffering and
oppression of a native people living and dying under the heel
of Israeli colonialism, can escape a sense of déjà
vu in light of events in Iraq: the stone-throwing protesters,
firing into crowds, tanks rolling into streets, curfews, and
checkpoints common to Palestine now appear in America's own newly
occupied territories. In fact, it could not be otherwise, for
it so happens that the architects of liberation in Iraq have
hired the builders of that inspiring edifice of apartheid which
prevails in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to carry out their present
task.
At the top of the list is of course General
Garner himself, a close associate of the powerful Washington
group Jewish Institute of National Affairs (JINSA) and signatory
of a JINSA-initiated petition blaming Palestinians for the flare-up
of violence sparking the second Intifada-a most curious position
considering that in its opening months 272 Palestinians were
killed as opposed to 18 Israelis.(21) Garner's recently-anointed
State Department superior is close to Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
who along with former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle
is a JINSA associate and fervent supporter of Israel's far-right
and the war on Iraq. The overseer for 'reconstruction' of post-war
Iraq is Douglas Feith, a Perle associate who also favored an
intensified permanent military reoccupation of Palestinian land.
The rabidly pro-Israel camp also includes the neoconservative
think tanks which constitute the ideological pillars of the administration:
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Project for a New American
Century (PNAC), where Rumsfeld and Cheney stand as distinguished
members. At any rate, the ties between the American and Israeli
far-right are well-known and have been elaborated upon elsewhere;
what is of importance in the context of the American program
to 'liberate' Iraq is to uncover the shining qualities of the
Israeli example from which our present civilizing mission derives
its inspiration.
The official mythology of Israel has
been parroted enough times for anyone familiar with other fairy-tales
such as Hansel and Gretel or The Seven Dwarves
to know the basics: Israel is an outpost of civilization facing
a frontier of Arab darkness, constantly forced to defend democracy
against hordes of heathens. This pleasant fiction has been shattered
in the past twenty years by Israel's own historians consulting
newly-declassified archives, who now admit that Israel "has
committed the sin of colonialism" through "the dispossession
and victimization of a whole people."(22) Thus as British
colonialism led by Cecil Rhodes began setting up a white settler
state in South Africa at the end of the 20th century, it found
a financial ally and ideological parallel: Zionism, whose mission
was to carve out a state for European Jews-"a settler minority"-in
the heart of the Arab world. (23) Early Zionists were well aware
that "the implementation of Zionism could only be at the
expense of the Palestinian Arabs"-hardly an inconvenience
because "'Disappearing' the Arabs lay at the heart of the
Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition for existence."
(24)
Equipped with the understanding that
its settlers "have not come to an empty land to inherit
it, butto conquer a country from people inhabiting it,"
Zionist leadership prepared "compulsory transfer,"
so as to "remove the Arabs from our midst," in Ben-Gurion's
words.(25) Thus even before the outside Arab states intervened
in 1948-in which case the Zionist militia still "outnumbered
all the Arab forces arrayed against it, and, after the first
round of fighting [] outgunned them too"-Palestinians were
massacred and expelled en masse, stripped of their property and
possessions.(26) The conquering settlers destroyed some 400 villages,
swallowed up half the land, and confiscated "British pounds,
jewelry and other over valuables" including hundreds of
shops and "truck-loads of property".(27) Once the war
was over, some 750,000 Palestinians were relegated to the status
of expropriated refugees, a position of crushing weakness whose
dreadful consequences they have been unable to escape.
Israeli leaders, well aware of the success
of their ethnic cleansing campaign and their great advantage
in military and political power, would come to boast that they
are "the generation of colonizers" presiding over a
land where "there is not one single placethat did not have
a former Arab population."(28) Top Israeli government officials
freely express their hatred of the native with the pride that
comes with being a colonial power: as "crocodiles",
"beasts walking on two legs", "grasshoppersheads
smashed against the boulders and walls", and "drugged
cockroaches in a bottle."(29) And with these words have
followed complementary action: in the past three decades, thousands
of Palestinian homes have been razed to the ground to create
space for exclusively Jewish settlements filled with religious
fanatics, the previous inhabitants tortured, transferred, detained,
and murdered at will despite loud protestations from human rights
groups inside and outside Israel.
Today of course, the Israeli leadership
fears no one. Their settlers proudly proclaim that "One
million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail," their
military chief openly describes Palestinians as a "cancer",
their officers speak of "internalizing the lessons of how
the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto," their army
mows down 72 Palestinians in a month absent of a single suicide-bombing,
their prime minister, indicted for massacring 1,800 civilians,
is hailed as "a man of peace" by America's president.(30)
The Palestinians, for their part, remain imprisoned in ever-diminishing
strips of uncultivable land, surrounded by settlers and soldiers,
haunted by increasingly alarming levels of poverty (50%), unemployment
(70%), and hunger, now burdened with-in the words of one Israeli
policeman-"a different kind of despair, more like the one
experienced by the Jews in the European Ghettos." (31)
There can be no doubt as to the implications
of the aforementioned facts. The 'liberators' of Iraq, so intoxicated
with a sense of superiority, deeply inhale these noxious fumes
of Israeli brutality before releasing from their lips sweet words
about saving Iraq as if it were perfectly natural. Sure enough,
they speak with pride about instilling 'democracy' and 'Western
values' in Iraq-but for decades Palestinians have been exposed
to what these gentlemen consider the epitome of such 'values':
Israel. We have seen with what results.
On this score there is an additional charge to contend with:
the neoconservative camp furiously denies the relevance and impact
of Israel's policies on America's colonial program, insisting
that such talk is the product of anti-Semitic imaginations. This
is nothing new. Israel's cheerleaders have long sought to deflect
criticism of that nation's ethnic cleansing, torture, indiscriminate
killing, bulldozing, and land aggrandizement by raising the specter
of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately for them, many of Israel's leading
critics are Jewish, the uncomfortable facts of Israel's past
have been dug up largely by Jewish historians, a half-thousand
of Israel's own soldiers refuse to serve in occupied lands, and
so on. The real point here is that Israel's supporters invoke
the charge of anti-Semitism not only to deflect criticism
but also because they consider Palestinian life so worthless
that they cannot believe criticism of Israel to be genuinely
motivated by anything other than anti-Semitism.
Neoconservatives embrace the same distorted
logic: in their view, no one could possibly be opposed to a policy
of destruction and perpetual war on its own 'merits'; it is simply
the Jewish background of some neoconservatives which stirs anger.
What can one do when faced with this extraordinary performance
of mental gymnastics? We can only confess that, lacking the vast
funds of the Pentagon, we cannot hire enough missionaries to
convert neoconservatives who are of Jewish persuasion to another
religion and thus 'validate' our position. Paupers that we are,
we must instead insist on certain strange and exotic principles,
namely, that it is the content of one's actions, not one's
religious or racial background, which determines its moral value.
And the 'moral value' of the neoconservative program is not in
doubt.
Let us sum up the result: America's fondness
for the Israeli model presents yet another blow to the case of
compassionate colonialism. One cannot claim to liberate one set
of Arabs with the murderers of another set of Arabs. But the
adoption of old colonialist methods to impose a new world order
means not only the 'Palestinization' of Iraq but also the 'Israelization'
of America: That is to say, the intensification of violence and
dominance over the Arab under the pretext of exporting democratic
values requires the accelerated deterioration of those very values
within America.
All the hate, self-righteousness, and
sense of superiority in society must be marshaled, disciplined,
and directed against reason, against rationality, to maintain
the coherency of the colonial project. Militarism and racism
become the order of the day; society totally subordinates itself
to the unquestioned leadership of a profiteering few; the media
and press remain obedient; lies are beaten and hammered into
truth; truth is beaten and hammered into forgotten history. This
process now emerging in America has already fully matured in
Israel, where, distinguished commentator Uri Avnery writes, "The
callousness has spread from the occupied territories into Israel
itself."(32) Thus the question is no longer whether American
elites will 'uplift' Iraqis -but rather to what depths
these exponents of our civilizing mission have themselves
descended.
First, there is the spectacle of naked
greed. With European nations uninvited to the financial feast
that is post-war Iraq, American corporations stand to profit
quite handsomely. Consider the government contract awarded to
Bechtel Corporation to the tune of $680 million for the purposes
of 'rebuilding' Iraq, possibly worth billions down the line.
Not more than a month ago, the head of Bechtel was appointed
as a member of Bush's Export Council, which advises on trade.
The senior vice president of the company is a member of the government-appointed
Defense Policy Board. Its former president George Schultz openly
militated for war against Iraq and served as Secretary of State
under Reagan in 1983, at which time he sent Donald Rumsfeld to
Iraq as a special envoy to conduct business with Saddam Hussein-the
same Rumsfeld who heads the Defense Policy Board today and sold
two nuclear reactors to North Korea in 2000.(33)
Speaking of the DPB, it recently suffered
an undoubtedly grave loss as one of its esteemed members, Richard
Perle, recently resigned under pressure due to a 'conflict of
interest' when it became evident he was conducting deals with
a Saudi businessman on behalf of a company that stood to profit
from war.(34) But no discussion of the incestuous government-business-war
enterprise known as modern capitalism would be complete without
mentioning Vice President Dick Cheney, who is the former head
of Halliburton Company, which now serves as " the 'corps
of engineers' to the US military" and specializes in developing
oil fields. In a closed government contract worth up to $7 billion,
Halliburton was put in charge of limiting damage to Iraq's oil
wells in the event they were set ablaze-an early indication of
its potential reach. New disclosures by the Army now reveal that
Haliburton has also been granted the role of directly "operating
pumps and distributing oil" in Iraq. (35)
Dressing up such brazen profiteering
in the more respectable robes of a liberation campaign is no
small task. But few are better equipped to carry it out than
America's most illustrious recruit in the war effort-its media
and press. Experts in the art of cultivating conformity and fealty
to the administration's line with the prized paintbrushes of
'objectivity' and 'no spin zones', these organs of a supposedly
'free press' have became mere propaganda outlets. Television
news stations first morphed into ex-generals' clubs, as an endless
string of former military men appeared on hand to offer their
comments on this or that military maneuver, including the use
of cruise missiles to destroy -Al-Jazeera's offices in
Iraq. To this achievement we can add CNN chief Eason Jordan's
proud description of all the military experts on his network:
"I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the
war started and met with important people there, and said'here
are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on
the air and off about the war'. And we got a big thumbs-up on
all of them. That was important." Meanwhile, one American
paper fired a technology reporter for attending an anti-war rally,
and MSNBC squeezed an apologetic extraction out of one
of its reporters, Ashley Banfield, who dared to criticize the
network's sanitized war coverage.(36) To the Pentagon's credit,
no cruise missiles were fired at Ms. Banfield.
Nothing more clearly exposes the poverty
of America's leadership than the set of puppet exiles they have
chosen to help take over Iraq. The favorite eunuch of the hour
among Pentagon officials is Ahmed Chalabi, who has been comfortably
ensconced in London for the past half-century before returning
'home' to Iraq. He was airlifted into the region along with several
hundred other Iraqi National Congress (INC) exiles courtesy of
American C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and Special Forces
after major war operations subsided. Chalabi, who travels around
with an entourage of mercenaries he lauds as "brave volunteers,"
(and whom he pays $300 per month for their services) found himself
welcomed at his first press conference in Iraq by bullets.(37)
One of his first acts was to take up residence at a playground
palace formerly owned by Saddam Hussein's demented son Uday.(38)
He has also been indicted by the Jordanian government for massive
bank fraud-clearly placing him in the ranks of America's own
towering leaders. In another sign of belonging, the powerful
American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) cordially
invited the INC to its annual conference in April, where the
drums for war against other Muslim countries beat loudly.(39)
Chalabi and other exiles of his ilk like
Kanan Makiya, who praised America's bombing of Iraq as "music
to my ears," have demonstrated the proper fealty and subservience
to America's hawks, adeptly filling the role of what Malcolm
X once called the 'house Negro' That these exiles who first donned
their American aprons long ago have no credibility among the
Iraqi masses is indisputable. Shiite, Islamist, and nationalist
currents, which never quite embraced the war with the expected
mass jubilee, have made their voices prominently heard in large
daily demonstrations, raising slogans against the American presence
and the INC itself.
Of course, all this must be hastily forgotten
and set aside: we are, after all, led by a man on a divine mission,
the leader of leaders, hero among heroes, George W. Bush. The
man who bathed in the warm applause of American Navy sailors
after a successful (and well-staged) aircraft carrier landing
is not frowned upon for evading military service in Vietnam,
but hailed for bravery and courage. He is not chastised for aligning
himself so closely with a Christian Right which ceaselessly demonizes
Islam and demands a return to stagnant obscurantism, but is lauded
for deep faith and religiosity. His crude and Kafkaesque rhetoric,
vows to wreak vengeance upon nations across the globe, and unwavering
contempt for all opposition inspire awe and admiration from large
sections of an obsequious domestic audience.
What can one say about this most pathetic
state of affairs? Have all our genuine democrats, conscientious
intellectuals, gatekeepers of civil liberties, and guardians
of constitutional rights been whisked away to Iraq? The internal
decomposition of progressive ideals in America has created the
rot from which the maggots of Reaction have emerged, now calmly
awaiting their metamorphoses so as to buzz about above the carcass
of progressive principles the moment society surrenders and ceases
to resist the renewed spirit of imperialism. This new imperialism,
as evidenced, will not be one of civilizing, liberating, and
uplifting. Behind that proud but always illusory image of the
strong Western figure with sturdy shoulders primed to carry White
Man's Burden lies a pathetic and scrawny creature, emaciated
by a diet of hypocrisy, duplicity, and denial, whose atrophied
muscles are flexed only against the poorest, weakest, most vulnerable
ranks of humanity and whose ego swells with false pride upon
defeating third-rate armies of Third Word countries whose people
are left in ruins.
For Americans who are committed to the
cause of universal justice, the first task in the struggle towards
a more humane society is to soberly come to terms with the true
breadth and scope of the deeply-rooted problems that now face
us, which I have attempted to lay out above. For no matter how
vicious, how appalling, how infuriating the authors of this civilizing
mission may be, they do not represent irrational or grotesque
aberrations from a preset course of general progress. Rather,
they represent the natural, ineluctable outcome of an irrational
and grotesque system, whose preset course will lead towards
increased suffering and misery until men and women of courage
and conviction move with all their might to combat it and carve
out new, brighter paths for humanity to follow.
M. Junaid Alam
is a member of Northeastern University Campus Against War and
Racism. He can be reached at: redjaguar@attbi.com
Notes
1. David Ross, "Saddam Hussein,
Donald Rumsfeld, and the Golden Spurs: An interview with Jeremy
Scahill", Z Magazine, November 2002.
2. See U.S. Senate Committee on Banking,
Housing, and Urban Affairs Second Staff Report on U.S. Chemical
and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq and The
Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the War, May 25,
1994.
3. Anthony Loyd, "Gas victims struggle for air at gasp as
Western 'hypocrisy'", The Sunday Times (UK), February
23, 2003.
4. John Pilger, "A People Betrayed", Independent
(UK), February 23, 2003.
5. Foreign Policy Planning Study 23, State Department, Published
in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Volume
I, pp. 509-529.
6. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, by Harlan
K. Ullman and James P. Wade, NDU Press Book, 1996. Online: http://www.dodccrp.org/shockIndex.html
7. Brian Whitaker, "Conflict and catchphrases", The
Guardian (UK), February 24, 2003.
8. Suzanne Goldenberg, "The hell
that was once a hospital", The Guardian (UK), April
12, 2003.
9. Jonathan Duffy, "US troops 'encouraged' Iraqi looters",
BBC News Online, May 6, 2003.
10. Robert Fisk, "A Civilisation Torn To Pieces",
The Independent (UK), April 16, 2003.
11. Hassan Hafidh, "Iraqis Begin Oil Minister, Output Talks",
Reuters, April 20, 2003.
12. Ed Vuillamy, "Israel seeks pipeline for Iraqi oil",
The Observer (UK), April 20, 2003.
13. "Some Iraqis Try to Stop Looters in Baghdad", Associated
Press, April 11, 2003.
14. "At least 10 dead as US troops in firefight in northern
Iraq", AFP, April 15, 2003.
15. Thanassis Cambanis, "Iraqis slam US presence",
Boston Globe, April 19, 2003.
16. Paul Belden, "Oh no, not again", Asia Times,
April 23, 2003.
17. Jonathan Steele, "Keep out of town hall, Kut tells US
troops", The Guardian, April 25, 2003.
18. Sarah Left, "US troops 'kill 13 Iraqi protesters'",
The Guardian, April 29, 2003.
19. Chris Hughes, "Two Killed in New Iraq Demo Shooting",
The Mirror (UK), May 1, 2003.
20. "U.S. Troops Fire on Iraqi Protestors Again", Associated
Press, April 30, 2003.
21. Statistics from Israeli human rights group B'TSelem (www.btselem.org)
22. Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and
Israel, Benjamin Beit-Hallahami
23. .S. Africa connection: Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid
State (London: Zed Books, 1987, p. 3-4.) Also see: Ralph
Schoemman, The Hidden History of Zionism, Veritas Press,
Santa Barbara (Calif.) 1988. Online: http://www.marxists.de/middleast/schoenman/ch02.htm/
Settler Minority: Benny Morris, "Revisiting the
Palestinian exodus of 1948," in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi
Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine (Cambridge: 2001),
pp. 39-40.
24. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton:
1998) and Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York:
2001), pp.404-5.
25. First quote (Israel's first foreign minister, Moshe
Sharret): Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, New
York: Random House, Inc., 2001. p.91, Rest (Ben-Gurion):
Benny Morris, "Revisiting the Palestinian exodus of 1948,"
in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine
(Cambridge: 2001) and Benny Morris, Righteous Victims,
New York: Random House, Inc., 2001
26. Avi Shlaim, "Israel and the Arab Coalition in 1948",
contained in The War for Palestine, ed. Eugene L. Rogan
and Avi Shlaim, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. p.81,
89, 99.
27. Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, Free Press, 1986.
28. Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi,
"Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and
Israel"
29. Ehud Barak, Israeli PM: Jerusalem
Post August 30, 2000; Menachem Begin, Israeli PM: New
Statesman, 25 June 1982; Yitzakh Rabin, Israeli PM: New
York Times, April 1, 1988; Ralph Eitan, IDF Chief of Staff:
New York Times, April 14, 1983.
30. Settler quote: New York Times,
February 28, 1994; Chief of Staff quote: Haaretz, May
10, 2003; Warsaw Ghetto: Haaretz, January 25th (Hebrew
version), 2003; 80 dead Palestinians: Haaretz, March 6,
2003.
31. On health and economy: James Bennet,
New York Times, March 6, 2003; Israeli policeman quote:
Neve Gordon, "Come to Dinner When the War Ends", Dissident
Voice, March 31, 2003.
For an excellent and thorough overview
of the I-P conflict, see Norman Finkelstein's analysis:
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id128.htm
I also recommend my own more polemical overview on the subject:
http://www.counterpunch.org/alam0713.html
32. Uri Avnery, "At Midnight, A
Knock on the Door", Counterpunch, April 20, 2003.
33. Pratap Chatterjee, "Bechtel Wins Iraq War Contracts",
CorpWatch, April 24, 2003 and Randeep Ramesh, "The
two faces of Rumsfeld", The Guardian, May 9, 2003.
34. Seymour Hersh's piece on Perle: "Lunch with the Chairman",
The New Yorker, March 17th, 2003.
35. Carolyn Koo, "War Could Be Big Business for Halliburton",
Reuters, March 23, 2003, "More Flak on Halliburton
Deal", Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003, Roland
Watson, "Cheney's old firm handed lucrative oilfield contract",
The Sunday Times, May 8, 2003.
36. On CNN chief, Banfield, and firing: Patrick Martin, "Media
bosses admit pro-war bias in coverage of Iraq", World
Socialist Web Site, May 2, 2003.
37. Kim Sengupta, "Gunfire interrupts first press conference
by 'Pentagon's man'", The Independent, April 19,
2003.
38. Sharon Behn, "Chalabi sets up base in Uday's palace",
The Washington Times, April 18, 2003.
39. Nathan Guttman, "AIPAC and the Iraqi Opposition",
Haaretz, April 7, 2003.
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