A monument to hypocrisy

[djxeno]

A monument to hypocrisy

Edward Said

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/625/op2.htm

It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this

country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through

the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just

to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning, but patience and

masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, designed obviously to

outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN into going to war, seems to

me to have been a new low point in moral hypocrisy and political

manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in Munich this past weekend went

one step further than the bumbling Powell in unctuous sermonising and

bullying derision. For the moment, I shall discount George Bush and his

coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers like Pat

Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves of power

perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman

Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has

said, in direct contact with God, or if not God, then at least Providence.

Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of

state and defence seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women

and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their

words and activities.

First, a few preliminaries. The US has clearly decided on war: there seem to

be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take place or not

(given all the activity started, not by the Arab states who, as usual, seem

to dither and be paralysed at the same time, but by France, Russia and

Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless to have transported 200,000

troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, leaving aside smaller deployments

in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean only one thing.

Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are

chicken hawks, that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting

themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that entirely

civilian group were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam War, yet each of

them got a deferment based on privilege, and therefore never fought or so

much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence is therefore

morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, anti-democratic in the extreme.

What this unrepresentative cabal seeks in a war with Iraq has nothing to do

with actual military considerations. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities

of its deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to

neighbours like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could easily

handle it militarily) or certainly to the US. Any argument to the contrary is

simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. With a few outdated

Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and biological material, most of it

supplied by the US in earlier days (as Nader has said, we know that because

we have the receipts for what was sold to Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and

has easily been, containable, though at unconscionable cost to the

long-suffering civilian population. For this terrible state of affairs I

think it is absolutely true to say that there has been collusion between the

Iraqi regime and the Western enforcers of the sanctions.

Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change --a process already

begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs of this country --there is simply no end

in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a dubious caliber actually

go on blathering about bringing democracy, modernisation, and liberalisation

to the Middle East? God knows that the area needs it, as so many Arab and

Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people have said over and over. But who

appointed these characters as agents of progress anyway? And what entitles

them to pontificate in so shameless a way when there are already so many

injustices and abuses in their own country to be remedied? It's particularly

galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be

on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have been an

election adviser to Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government during the

period 1996-9, in which he counseled the renegade Israeli to scrap any and

all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and try to get rid of as

many Palestinians as possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to

the Middle East, and does so without provoking the slightest objection from

any of the media pundits who politely (abjectly) quiz him on national

television.

Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its plagiarised

and manufactured evidence, its confected audio-tapes and its doctored

pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has violated

numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that

and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical about

the official US position is that literally everything Powell has accused the

Ba'athists of has been the stock in trade of every Israeli government since

1948, and at no time more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967.

Torture, illegal detention, assassination, assaults against civilians with

missiles, helicopters and jet fighters, annexation of territory,

transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of

imprisonment, mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatilla to mention

only the most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded

civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians as human shields,

humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale,

destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlement,

economic pauperisation, attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances,

killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses: all these,

it should be noted with emphasis, have been carried on with the total,

unconditional support of the United States which has not only supplied Israel

with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and

intelligence aid, but also has given the country upwards of $135 billion in

economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by

the US government on its own citizens.

This is an unconscionable record to hold against the US, and Mr Powell as its

human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of US foreign policy, it

is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this country, and to

make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of freedom

--the proclaimed central plank in the US's foreign policy since at least 1976

--is applied uniformly, without exception or condition. How he and his bosses

and co-workers can stand up before the world and righteously sermonise

against Iraq while at the same time completely ignoring the ongoing American

partnership in human rights abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet no

one, in all the justified critiques of the US position that have appeared

since Powell made his great UN speech, has focused on this point, not even

the ever-so-upright French and Germans. The Palestinian territories today are

witnessing the onset of a mass famine; there is a health crisis of

catastrophic proportions; there is a civilian death toll that totals at least

a dozen to 20 people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands

of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move about as curfews and

at least 300 barricades impede their daily lives; houses are blown up or

bulldozed on a mass basis (60 yesterday). And all of it with US equipment, US

political support, US finances. Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war

criminal by any standard, is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent

Palestinians' lives that have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his

criminal army. And he has the gall to say that he acts in God's name, and

that he (and his administration) act to serve "a just and faithful God". And,

more astounding yet, he lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN

resolutions even as he supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at least

64 of them on a daily basis for more than half a century.

But so craven and so ineffective are the Arab regimes today that they don't

dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need US economic aid.

Many of them fear their own people and need US support to prop up their

regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the same crimes against

humanity. So they say nothing, and just hope and pray that the war will pass,

while in the end keeping them in power as they are.

But it is also a great and noble fact that for the first time since World War

Two there are mass protests against the war taking place before rather than

during the war itself. This is unprecedented and should become the central

political fact of the new, globalised era into which our world has been

thrust by the US and its super-power status. What this demonstrates is that

despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and

his American antagonists, despite the complicity of a mass media that has

(willingly or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, despite the indifference

and ignorance of a great many people, mass action and mass protest on the

basis of human community and human sustainability are still formidable tools

of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. But that

they have at least tampered with the plans of the Washington chicken hawks

and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of religious

monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars of

religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to lecture or

speak out against these injustices I haven't found anyone in support of the

war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to US action in Iraq to our

support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan and everywhere

in the Arab world --and also ask others to force the same linkage on

everyone, Arab, American, African, European, Australian and Asian. These are

world issues, human issues, not simply strategic matters for the United

States or the other major powers.

We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White House

has openly announced will include three to five hundred cruise missiles a day

(800 of them during the first 48 hours of the war) raining down on the

civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce "Shock and Awe", or even a

human cataclysm that will produce, as its boastful planner a certain Mr (or

is it Dr?) Harlan Ullman has said, a Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi

people. Note that during the 1991 Gulf War after 41 days of bombing Iraq this

scale of human devastation was not even approached. And the US has 6000

"smart" missiles ready to do the job. What sort of God would want this to be

a formulated and announced policy for His people? And what sort of God would

claim that this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not

only of Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?

These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if

anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth it would

be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals according

to the Nuremberg Laws that the US itself was crucial in formulating. Not for

nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the war and praise George

Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in the name of Good? Every one of

us must raise our voices, and march in protest, now and again and again. We

need creative thinking and bold action to stave off the nightmares planned by

a docile, professionalised staff in places like Washington and Tel Aviv and

Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is what they call "greater security"

then words have no meaning at all in the ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon

have contempt for the non-white people of this world is clear. The question

is, how long can they keep getting away with it?

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