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Edward Said: "Apocalypse Now"
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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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