A Monument to Hypocrisy
by Edward
Said
Dissident Voice
February 13, 2003
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?
Edward Said is University Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is a leading Palestinian
intellectual and activist. Among his books are The End of the Peace Process:
Oslo and After (Pantheon, 2000), Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on
Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (Vintage, 1996), and Out of
Place: A Memoir (Knopf, 1999). This article first appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)