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CounterPunch
March 8,
2003
Who's In Charge?
A Tiny, Unelected
Group, Backed by Powerful Unrepresentative Interests
By EDWARD SAID
The Bush administration's relentless unilateral
march towards war is profoundly disturbing for many reasons,
but so far as American citizens are concerned the whole grotesque
show is a tremendous failure in democracy. An immensely wealthy
and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals,
all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public pressure,
and simply turned on its head. It is no exaggeration to say that
this war is the most unpopular in modern history. Before the
war has begun there have been more people protesting it in this
country alone than was the case at the height of the anti- Vietnam
war demonstrations during the 60s and 70s. Note also that those
rallies took place after the war had been going on for several
years: this one has yet to begin, even though a large number
of overtly aggressive and belligerent steps have already been
taken by the US and its loyal puppy, the UK government of the
increasingly ridiculous Tony Blair.
I have been criticised recently for my
anti-war position by illiterates who claim that what I say is
an implied defence of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime.
To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly
opposed Ba'athi Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait in
1985, when in an open conversation with the then Minister of
Education Hassan Al-Ibrahim I accused him and his regime of aiding
and abetting  Arab fascism in their financial
support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud
to have committed billions of dollars to Saddam's war against
"the Persians", as they were then contemptuously called,
and that it was a more important struggle than someone like me
could comprehend. I remember clearly warning those Kuwaiti acolytes
of Saddam Hussein about him and his ill will against Kuwait,
but to no avail. I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime
since it came to power in the 70s: I never visited the place,
never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernisation
(even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated
Iraq as the main gun in the Arab arsenal against Zionism, a stupid
idea, I thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods
of rule and fascist behaviour. And now when I speak my mind about
the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition
as hapless strutting tools of US imperialism, I am told that
I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more
later), and am therefore unable to appreciate their nobility
of soul. Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week
after extolling President Bush's commitment to democracy Professor
Makiya is now denouncing the US and its plans for a post-Saddam
military-Ba'athi government in Iraq. When individuals get in
the habit of switching the gods whom they worship politically
there's no end to the number of changes they make before they
finally come to rest in utter disgrace and well deserved oblivion.
But to return to the US and its current
actions. In all my encounters and travels I have yet to meet
a person who is for the war. Even worse, most Americans now feel
that this mobilisation has already gone too far to stop, and
that we are on the verge of a disaster for the country. Consider
first of all that the Democratic Party, with few exceptions,
has simply gone over to the president's side in a gutless display
of false patriotism. Wherever you look in the Congress there
are the tell-tale signs either of the Zionist lobby, the right-wing
Christians, or the military-industrial complex, three inordinately
influential minority groups who share hostility to the Arab world,
unbridled support for extremist Zionism, and an insensate conviction
that they are on the side of the angels. Every one of the 500
congressional districts in this country has a defence industry
in it, so that war has been turned into a matter of jobs, not
of security. But, one might well ask, how does running an unbelievably
expensive war remedy, for instance, economic recession, the almost
certain bankruptcy of the social security system, a mounting
national debt, and a massive failure in public education? Demonstrations
are looked at simply as a kind of degraded mob action, while
the most hypocritical lies pass for absolute truth, without criticism
and without objection.
The media has simply become a branch
of the war effort. What has entirely disappeared from television
is anything remotely resembling a consistently dissenting voice.
Every major channel now employs retired generals, former CIA
agents, terrorism experts and known neoconservatives as "consultants"
who speak a revolting jargon designed to sound authoritative
but in effect supporting everything done by the US, from the
UN to the sands of Arabia. Only one major daily newspaper (in
Baltimore) has published anything about US eavesdropping, telephone
tapping and message interception of the six small countries that
are members of the Security Council and whose votes are undecided.
There are no antiwar voices to read or hear in any of the major
medias of this country, no Arabs or Muslims (who have been consigned
en masse to the ranks of the fanatics and terrorists of this
world), no critics of Israel, not on Public Broadcasting, not
in The New York Times, the New Yorker, US News and World Report,
CNN and the rest. When these organisations mention Iraq's flouting
of 17 UN resolutions as a pretext for war, the 64 resolutions
flouted by Israel (with US support) are never mentioned. Nor
is the enormous human suffering of the Iraqi people during the
past 12 years mentioned. Whatever the dreaded Saddam has done
Israel and Sharon have also done with American support, yet no
one says anything about the latter while fulminating about the
former. This makes a total mockery of taunts by Bush and others
that the UN should abide by its own resolutions.
The American people have thus been deliberately
lied to, their interests cynically misrepresented and misreported,
the real aims and intentions of this private war of Bush the
son and his junta concealed with complete arrogance. Never mind
that Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle, all of them unelected officials
who work for unelected Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, have
for some time openly advocated Israeli annexation of the West
Bank and Gaza and the cessation of the Oslo process, have called
for war against Iraq (and later Iran), and the building of more
illegal Israeli settlements in their capacity (during Netanyahu's
successful campaign for prime minister in 1996) as private consultants
to him, and that that has become US policy now.
Never mind that Israel's iniquitous policies
against Palestinians, which are reported only at the ends of
articles (when they are reported at all) as so many miscellaneous
civilian deaths, are never compared with Saddam's crimes, which
they match or in some cases exceed, all of them, in the final
analysis, paid for by the US taxpayer without consultation or
approval. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been wounded seriously
in the last two years, and about 2,500 killed wantonly by Israeli
soldiers who are instructed to humiliate and punish an entire
people during what has become the longest military occupation
in modern history.
Never mind that not a single critical
Arab or Muslim voice has been seen or heard on the major American
media, liberal, moderate, or reactionary, with any regularity
at all since the preparations for war have gone into their final
phase. Consider also that none of the major planners of this
war, certainly not the so-called experts like Bernard Lewis and
Fouad Ajami, neither of whom has so much as lived in or come
near the Arab world in decades, nor the military and political
people like Powell, Rice, Cheney, or the great god Bush himself,
know anything about the Muslim or Arab worlds beyond what they
see through Israeli or oil company or military lenses, and therefore
have no idea what a war of this magnitude against Iraq will produce
for the people actually living there.
And consider too the sheer, unadorned
hubris of men like Wolfowitz and his assistants. Asked to testify
to a largely somnolent Congress about the war's consequences
and costs they are allowed to escape without giving any concrete
answers, which effectively dismisses the evidence of the army
chief of staff who has spoken of a military occupation force
of 400,000 troops for 10 years at a cost of almost a trillion
dollars.
Democracy traduced and betrayed, democracy
celebrated but in fact humiliated and trampled on by a tiny group
of men who have simply taken charge of this republic as if it
were nothing more than, what, an Arab country? It is right to
ask who is in charge since clearly the people of the United States
are not properly represented by the war this administration is
about to loose on a world already beleaguered by too much misery
and poverty to endure more. And Americans have been badly served
by a media controlled essentially by a tiny group of men who
edit out anything that might cause the government the slightest
concern or worry. As for the demagogues and servile intellectuals
who talk about war from the privacy of their fantasy worlds,
who gave them the right to connive in the immiseration of millions
of people whose major crime seems to be that they are Muslims
and Arabs? What American, except for this small unrepresentative
group, is seriously interested in increasing the world's already
ample stores of anti-Americanism? Hardly any I would suppose.
Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living
at this hour.
Yesterday's
Features
The Black Commentator
All
About Clarence
Ben Granby
Nightmare
in Rafah
Fidel Castro
Bush's
War on the Dark Corners of the World
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Riding
the Tiger in India: Will the World's Largest Democracy Become
a Religio-Fascist Purgatory?
Linda Heard
Make Way for Reality Politics
Alex Lynch
Tragedy of the Ridiculous War
Paul D'Amato
Obey
the US or Pay the Price
Ron Jacobs
Peace Treaties, Nukes and North Korea
Shulamit Aloni
Murder
Under the Cover of Rigtheousness
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February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti----War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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