[Media-watch] An article by Edward Said

[Zahera Harb]

Something to read, an article by Edward Said published on 
english.daralhayat.com. Dar Alhayat publishes one of the leading 
Arabic newspapers in the Arab World 'Al Hayat', meaning 'Life' in 
English. They have recently added an English website to their online 
services. you can view it on <english.daralhayat.com> 

A Stupid War
Edward W. Said Al-Hayat 2003/04/14
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 still 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, mass 
uprisings in Basra, four or five "falls" of Umm Qasr and Faw - 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 Nassiriyah, one of them, 
the impressible Taysir Alouni, 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 sub-standard 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 weapons of mass destruction that furnish an 
imminent threat to the United States. No one. Iraq is a hugely 
weakened and sub-par 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 which 
no journalist of the overpaid legions who swarm around the Pentagon, 
State Department and White House has ever bothered to pursue.

Yet 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 Begin's 
air force bombed Iraq preemptively in 1981. Note therefore the 
creeping replication of Israeli assumptions and tactics (all of them, 
as I shall be showing, remarkably flawed) in what the U.S. has been 
planning and implementing in its current post 9/11 campaign or 
preemptive war. How regrettable that the media has 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, such that the neo-conservative cum Christian 
Right cum Pentagon civilian hawks stranglehold on American policy has 
become a sort of reality forcing on the entire country an attitude of 
total belligerency and free floating hostility. One would have 
thought that but for America's global dominance we would have been 
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 lynchpins 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 post-war careers by persuading the 
Americans of how easy an invasion would be) and 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 U.S. about thirty-five 
years or so ago to teach at Princeton where his fervent anti-
communism 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-fashioned Orientalism, he was quickly bypassed 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 pronouncements 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 post-9/11 bestseller and, I am 
told, required reading for the U.S. military, despite its vacuousness 
and unsupported, usually factually incorrect, statement about the 
Arabs during the past 500 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 were 
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, it would be seen, 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 don't know how, they would 
welcome us, and above all, they were totally susceptible to whatever 
power American could bring to bear.

Ajami is a Lebanese Shiite educated in the U.S. 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 anti-Arab 
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 of Foreign Relations. He is 
fond of describing himself as a non-fiction Naipaul and quotes Conrad 
while actually sounding as hokey as Khalil Jibran. 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 sub-human creatures whose world 
and actuality doesn'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. Dick 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 banal 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 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 were far from 
willing to accept more punishment on the off chance that they would 
be "liberated." After such liberation, what forgiveness? After all, 
look at the war against Afghanistan, which also featured bombing and 
peanut butter sandwiches. Yes, 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 constituency beyond Paul Wolfowitz's 
Pentagon office. He and his helpers (e.g. the thoroughly shabby Kanan 
Makiya who has said that the merciless high-altitude U.S. bombing of 
his native land is "music to my ears") plus a few ex-Baathists, 
Shiite clerics and others have also sold the U.S. administration a 
bill of goods about quick wars, deserting soldiers, 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 for basically ignorant and unchecked American 
policy planners to 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 racists premises underlying the campaign in Iraq are such 
thought-stopping propositions as having the power to redraw the 
Middle East map, setting in motion a "domino-effect" in bringing 
democracy there, and holding fast to the assumption that the Iraqi 
people constitute 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 for the LRB, 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. Nevermind: 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 bloody episode, but with other countries 
like Syria and Iran involved, shaky regimes shaken more, 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 are exhibited 
on Iraqi TV. The practice is much worse a) than bombing markets and 
whole cities and b) than showing rows of Iraqi prisoners made to 
kneel or lie spread-eagled face down in the sand. All of a sudden, 
the Geneva Convention are involved not for Camp X-Ray but for Saddam, 
and when his forces hide inside cities, that is cheating, whereas 
carpet bombing from 30,000 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 that 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 Bush's groping to stay on cue and 
on top of the texts they've prepared for him and 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."


 
©2003 Media Communications Group