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"THE MEDIA...IS
AN EXTENSION OF THE
WAR AGAINST IRAQ"
Professor Edward Said
MER - Washington - 12/21/97:
The following article was recently published
by Professor Edward Said, one of the most astute and thoughtful analysts
of Palestinian background who has lived most of his life in New York City
where he teaches Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
As the U.S. once again mobilizes its
modern-day empire against Iraq -- controlling the entire Middle East region
through its unique combination of military force, intelligence gathering,
"client regimes", military technology and big business relationships
-- Said's articles are surely among the most provocative and insightful,
even if he himself has chosen to go light on the Arab regimes (and also
to overlook the earlier this century British castration of Iraq that "created"
Kuwait in the first place), in order to be published in some of their key
newspapers.
One of the additional ironies about today's
Middle East is that Said's bi-weekly column is now jointly published in
key Saudi and Egyptian newspapers -- media controlled and manipulated by
American-sponsored regimes far more than what takes place in the U.S.;
and regimes whose conspiracy with the Americans to bring Iraq to its knees
at barbarous cost and to sell-out the Palestinians through the disingenuous
"Peace Process" Said has himself so brilliantly focused on in
other media at other times... but never in his Arab world
column.
.
.
A P O C A L Y P S E
N O W
Professor Edward Said
.
It would be a mistake, I think, to reduce what
is happening between Iraq and the United States simply to an assertion
of Arab will and sovereignty on the one hand versus American imperialism,
which undoubtedly plays a central role in all this. However misguided,
Saddam Hussein's cleverness is not that he is splitting America from its
allies (which he has not really succeeded in doing for any practical purpose)
but that he is exploiting the astonishing clumsiness and failures of US
foreign policy. Very few people, least of all Saddam himself, can be fooled
into believing him to be the innocent victim of American bullying; most
of what is happening to his unfortunate people who are undergoing the most
dreadful and unacknowledged suffering is due in considerable degree to
his callous cynicism -- first of all, his indefensible and ruinous invasion
of Kuwait, his persecution of the Kurds, his cruel egoism and pompous self-regard
which persists in aggrandizing himself and his regime at exorbitant and,
in my opinion, totally unwarranted cost. It is impossible for him to plead
the case for national security and sovereignty now given his abysmal disregard
of it in the case of Kuwait and Iran.
.
Be that as it may, US vindictiveness, whose sources
I shall look at in a moment, has exacerbated the situation by imposing
a regime of sanctions which, as Sandy Berger, the American National Security
adviser has just said proudly, is unprecedented for its severity in the
whole of world history. 567,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the Gulf
War, mostly as a result of disease, malnutrition and deplorably poor medical
care. Agriculture and industry are at a total standstill. This is unconscionable
of course, and for this the brazen inhumanity of American policy-makers
is also very largely to blame. But we must not forget that Saddam is feeding
that inhumanity quite deliberately in order to dramatize the opposition
between the US and the rest of the Arab world; having provoked a crisis
with the US (or the UN dominated by the US) he at first dramatised the
unfairness of the sanctions. But by continuing it as he is now doing, the
issue has changed and has become his non-compliance, and the terrible effects
of the sanctions have been marginalised. Still the underlying causes of
an Arab/US crisis remain.
.
A careful analysis of that crisis is imperative.
The US has always opposed any sign of Arab nationalism or independence,
partly for its own imperial reasons and partly because its unconditional
support for Israel requires it to do so. Since the l973 war, and despite
the brief oil embargo, Arab policy up to and including the peace process
has tried to circumvent or mitigate that hostility by appealing to the
US for help, by "good" behavior, by willingness to make peace
with Israel. Yet mere compliance with the US's wishes can produce nothing
except occasional words of American approbation for leaders who appear
"moderate": Arab policy was never backed up with coordination,
or collective pressure, or fully agreed upon goals. Instead each leader
tried to make separate arrangements both with the US and with Israel, none
of which produced very much except escalating demands and a constant refusal
by the US to exert any meaningful pressure on Israel. The more extreme
Israeli policy becomes the more likely the US has been to support it. And
the less respect it has for the large mass of Arab peoples whose future
and well-being are mortgaged to illusory hopes embodied, for instance,
in the Oslo accords.
.
Moreover, a deep gulf separates Arab culture
and civilization on the one hand, from the United States on the other,
and in the absence of any collective Arab information and cultural policy,
the notion of an Arab people with traditions, cultures and identities of
their own is simply inadmissible in the US. Arabs are dehumanized, they
are seen as violent irrational terrorists always on the lookout for murder
and bombing outrages. The only Arabs worth doing business with for the
US are compliant leaders, businessmen, military people whose arms purchases
(the highest per capita in the world) are helping the American economy
keep afloat. Beyond that there is no feeling at all, for instance, for
the dreadful suffering of the Iraqi people whose identity and existence
have simply been lost sight of in the present situation.
.
This morbid, obsessional fear and hatred of the
Arabs has been a constant theme in US foreign policy since World War Two.
In some way also, anything positive about the Arabs is seen in the US as
a threat to Israel. In this respect pro-Israeli American Jews, traditional
Orientalists, and military hawks have played a devastating role. Moral
opprobrium is heaped on Arab states as it is on no others. Turkey, for
example, has been conducting a campaign against the Kurds for several years,
yet nothing is heard about this in the US. Israel occupies territory illegally
for thirty years, it violates the Geneva conventions at will, conducts
invasions, terrorist attacks and assassinations against Arabs, and still,
the US vetoes every sanction against it in the UN. Syria, Sudan, Libya,
Iraq are classified as "rogue" states. Sanctions against them
are far harsher than against any other countries in the history of US foreign
policy. And still the US expects that its own foreign policy agenda ought
to prevail (eg., the woefully misguided Doha economic summit) despite its
hostility to the collective Arab agenda.
In the case of Iraq a number of further extenuations
make the US even more repressive. Burning in the collective American unconscious
is a puritanical zeal decreeing the sternest possible attitude towards
anyone deemed to be an unregenerate sinner. This clearly guided American
policy towards the native American Indians, who were first demonized, then
portrayed as wasteful savages, then exterminated, their tiny remnant confined
to reservations and concentration camps. This almost religious anger fuels
a judgemental attitude that has no place at all in international politics,
but for the United States it is a central tenet of its worldwide behavior.
Second, punishment is conceived in apocalyptic terms. During the Vietnam
war a leading general advocated -- and almost achieved -- the goal of bombing
the enemy into the stone age. The same view prevailed during the Gulf War
in l99l. Sinners are meant to be condemned terminally, with the utmost
cruelty regardless of whether or not they suffer the cruelest agonies.
The notion of "justified" punishment for Iraq is now uppermost
in the minds of most American consumers of news, and with that goes an
almost orgiastic delight in the gathering power being summoned to confront
Iraq in the Gulf.
.
Pictures of four (or is now five?) immense aircraft
carriers steaming virtuously away punctuate breathless news bulletins about
Saddam's defiance, and the impending crisis. The President announces that
he is thinking not about the Gulf but about the 21st century: how can we
tolerate Iraq's threat to use biological warfare even though (this is unmentioned)
it is clear from the UNSCOM reports that he neither has the missile capacity,
nor the chemical arms, nor the nuclear arsenal, nor in fact the anthrax
bombs that he is alleged to be brandishing? Forgotten in all this is that
the US has all the terror weapons known to humankind, is the only country
to have used a nuclear bomb on civilians, and as recently as seven years
ago dropped 66,000 tons of bombs on Iraq. As the only country involved
in this crisis that has never had to fight a war on its own soil, it is
easy for the US and its mostly brain-washed citizens to speak in apocalyptic
terms. A report out of Australia on Sunday, November l6 suggests that Israel
and the US are thinking about a neutron bomb on Baghdad.
.
Unfortunately the dictates of raw power are very
severe and, for a weak state like Iraq, overwhelming. Certainly US misuse
of the sanctions to strip Iraq of everything, including any possibility
for security is monstrously sadistic. The so-called UN 661 Committee created
to oversee the sanctions is composed of fifteen member states (including
the US) each of which has a veto. Every time Iraq passes this committee
a request to sell oil for medicines, trucks, meat, etc., any member of
the committee can block these requests by saying that a given item may
have military purposes (tires, for example, or ambulances). In addition
the US and its clients -- eg., the unpleasant and racist Richard Butler,
who says openly that Arabs have a different notion of truth than the rest
of the world -- have made it clear that even if Iraq is completely reduced
militarily to the point where it is no longer a threat to its neighbors
(which is now the case) the real goal of the sanctions is to topple Saddam
Hussein's government. In other words according to the Americans, very little
that Iraq can do short of Saddam's resignation or death will produce a
lifting of sanctions. Finally, we should not for a moment forget that quite
apart from its foreign policy interest, Iraq has now become a domestic
American issue whose repercussions on issues unrelated to oil or the Gulf
are very important. Bill Clinton's personal crises -- the campaign-funding
scandals, an impending trial for sexual harassment, his various legislative
and domestic failures -- require him to look strong, determined and "presidential"
somewhere else, and where but in the Gulf against Iraq has he so ready-made
a foreign devil to set off his blue-eyed strength to full advantage. Moreover,
the increase in military expenditure for new investments in electronic
"smart" weaponry, more sophisticated aircraft, mobile forces
for the world-wide projection of American power are perfectly suited for
display and use in the Gulf, where the likelihood of visible casualties
(actually suffering Iraqi civilians) is extremely small, and where the
new military technology can be put through its paces most attractively.
For reasons that need restating here, the media is particularly happy to
go along with the government in bringing home to domestic customers the
wonderful excitement of American self-righteousness, the proud flag-waving,
the "feel-good" sense that "we" are facing down a monstrous
dictator. Far from analysis and calm reflection the media exists mainly
to derive its mission from the government, not to produce a corrective
or any dissent. The media, in short, is an extension of the war against
Iraq.
.
The saddest aspect of the whole thing is that
Iraqi civilians seem condemned to additional suffering and protracted agony.
Neither their government nor that of the US is inclined to ease the daily
pressure on them, and the probability that only they will pay for the crisis
is extremely high. At least -- and it isn't very much -- there seems to
be no enthusiasm among Arab governments for American military action, but
beyond that there is no coordinated Arab position, not even on the extremely
grave humanitarian question. It is unfortunate that, according to the news,
there is rising popular support for Saddam in the Arab world, as if the
old lessons of defiance without real power have still not been learned.
.
Undoubtedly the US has manipulated the UN to
its own ends, a rather shameful exercise given at the same time that the
Congress once again struck down a motion to pay a billion dollars in arrears
to the world organization. The major priority for Arabs, Europeans, Muslims
and Americans is to push to the fore the issue of sanctions and the terrible
suffering imposed on innocent Iraqi civilians. Taking the case to the International
Court in the Hague strikes me as a perfectly viable possibility, but what
is needed is a concerted will on behalf of Arabs who have suffered the
US's egregious blows for too long without an adequate response.
.
[Published in late November in Arabic in the
Saudi government controlled publication Al-Hayat, published in Arabic in
London, and in English in the Egyptian government controlled publication
Al Ahram Weekly published in Cairo.]
______________________________________________________________________
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