A-Infos (en) Eduard SAID on Irak bombing/US policy

[MichaelP <papadop@PEAK.ORG>]

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Barbarians at the gates By Edward Said
For over two months now, the United States has been conducting
     a low-intensity war of attrition against Iraq in the guise of
     sanctioned police action authorised by the United Nations. Let me
     say from the outset that there is no doubt in my mind that the
     Iraqi regime itself should be condemned for providing the US with a
     major pretext for prosecuting this dreadful war. Clearly, neither
     Saddam Hussein nor his military and political supporters in Iraq
     are bearing the major brunt of the suffering imposed by the US: it
     is innocent Iraqi people who are paying the price. The Baathist
     government is, alas, a government of unprincipled tyranny for which
     no excuse can be made: it has pillaged and invaded its neighbours,
     it has squandered its country's considerable wealth and human
     resources, and it has led a prosperous modern secular society into
     ruin.
       Since the Gulf War, the Iraqi government has lied and dissembled
     constantly. There can be little argument about that. The issue now
     is whether what the US is doing is commensurate with the Iraqi
     government's behaviour, or whether this war and sanctions far
     exceed in proportionality, savagery and hypocrisy what Saddam
     Hussein's rule has wrought.
       To start to answer that question, it is necessary to recall that
     about 15 months ago, in connection with the sanctions, Mrs Albright
     was asked on television whether US policy goals (unspecified at the
     time) were worth the near-genocidal number of deaths of Iraqi
     civilians, already exceeding the many hundreds of thousands. "Yes,"
     she replied confidently, "I think it is worth it." The premise is
     clear: whatever the US decrees according to its moral algebra is
     right, despite wholesale slaughter, disease and irreparable human
     cost.
       Writing in The Independent on Sunday (22 February), Robert Fisk
     meticulously outlined the incremental, scarcely visible steps by
     which the US has been conducting its largely unnoticed war against
     Iraq. He notes that, by hitting a few targets here and there nearly
     every day, American planners have counted on the media's
     inattention, since the bombings were reported only intermittently
     and in a piece-meal fashion on the back pages. This gave the US
     campaign an air of haphazard pinpricks that seemed nowhere near as
     intensive or dramatic as the four-day attack of mid-December. In
     fact, charges Fisk, more damage has been done since than during the
     December raids, which were the central event on CNN for the whole
     period. More civilians have been killed, more missile and
     anti-aircraft sites have been targeted, more areas of the country
     have been hit than earlier, and all this with scarcely a lifted
     eyebrow from major newspapers, TV channels, and commentators. For
     example, on 25 January, a Basra housing complex was hit with a loss
     of 17 people plus 100 wounded. "In other words," Fisk said, "most
     of the victims were children. A US spokesman admitted to the Basra
     attack, responding to the casualties with the words: 'I want to
     repeat that we are not targeting civilians.'"
       As I write these lines on 25 February, the New York Times reports
     that US planes hit what are described as "two missile sites" a few
     miles outside Baghdad; the paper goes on to say that Iraqi sources
     say that there were numerous civilian casualties. Two days later,
     an oil-pumping station was bombed and, although this was at first
     denied by the US, casualty figures have been given by Iraq. As
     Dennis Halliday, the UN director of the Oil for Food programme in
     Iraq, said in his letter of resignation late last year, the
     casualties of Iraq are mostly children, old people, women and the
     sick. The army, Baath Party officials, Saddam's entourage are
     spared the worst ravages of the war as well as the sanctions. A
     steady cross-border trade between Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iraq
     continues despite the sanctions, but only a relatively small number
     of people can benefit from this; the vast majority of the
     population has neither the means nor the mobility to get anything
     out of this smuggling.
       In addition, a UN official based in Iraq told me yesterday, even
     the Oil for Food programme is hardly working since most of Iraq's
     pumping capacity has either been deliberately targeted by bombing
     raids or rendered useless by the absence of spare parts, which are
     prohibited by the sanctions programme on the off chance that they
     might benefit Iraq's military programme. (On the same basis, tires
     for ambulances are prohibited, as are pencils for schools). Slowly,
     therefore, Iraq's infrastructure is being destroyed. Sewage,
     electrical power, travel, communications, food distribution, water,
     medicine, education -- access to all these is impaired to such a
     degree that most people now suffer the ravages of isolation,
     disease, darkness, and desperation without hope or respite. Anyone
     wishing to read about the horrendous extent of what has been done
     to Iraq is advised immediately to read the 1998 edition of Geoff
     Simons's book The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural
     Justice, a copious repository of facts, argument and condemnation
     (published by Macmillan's).
       The stated US goal, now openly declared, is to replace Saddam. As
     with most American strategic objectives this has a nice theoretical
     sound to it but, given the realities of the disorganised and
     discredited exile opposition, is hardly realisable. Even if it
     were, it would mean so vast and complete a realignment of internal
     Iraqi society as to fragment the country into incoherence and
     catastrophe. The question therefore is a two-part one: one, does
     the US have the right to do all this, and two, is such a strategy
     itself worth it in lives lost, ruined, and otherwise distorted
     beyond recognition?
       If the answer is no (as I believe it should be), we should then
     go on to ask why such a ruinous policy is being prosecuted for such
     meagre, not to say frighteningly inhumane results. A number of
     reasons propose themselves. First of all, there is a long,
     relatively uninterrupted tradition in American history of
     exterminating without mercy peoples who are considered to be
     savages and demons. This starts with the native American peoples,
     90 per cent of whom were massacred during the first two centuries
     of this country's life, all in the name of progress, doing God's
     work and eradicating barbarians.
       This history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even
     continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust deserves to be
     better known by non-Americans, who believe despite all the evidence
     that the US is a country dedicated to enlightened Wilsonian ideals
     of liberty and democracy. The facts tell a grisly story next to
     which the colonial experiences of Britain, France, Russia, Spain
     and Portugal can barely hold their own. An excellent source on the
     sad fate of local peoples is David Stannard's book American
     Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (l992), but
     this can be supplemented by Howard Zinn's important volume A
     People's History of the United States, 1492-Present (l980).
       The official story of America's dealings with lesser peoples is
     one of altruism, enlightenment and progressive policies of
     assistance and rescue. The real story is considerably darker, as a
     glance at the ruin brought on by US intervention throughout Latin
     America, the Caribbean, Asia (especially the Philippines, Japan,
     Indochina, and Indonesia), Africa, and the Middle East will
     instantly reveal. There is an attitude of murderous righteousness
     in most cases, roughly the same whether it is the New England
     Puritans killing Indians or people like Henry Kissinger ordering
     the bombing of Laos and Cambodia.
       A second factor is a combination of organised ignorance and
     official lying. Here the media plays a central role. To most
     Americans, Iraq is basically a non-existent place populated by a
     devil called Saddam Hussein, and that is all. Certainly the average
     person on the street is given no indication by CNN of the 6,000
     years of civilisation there, or that modern Iraq was arguably the
     most modern, secular and advanced of Arab countries before its
     systematic destruction. As for Iraqis as a people -- they can
     hardly be said to have any identity at all since neither the
     country's poets and artists, nor its doctors, nor its architects,
     nor its productive and courageous citizens are given any coverage
     at all.
       In effect then, as the US is destroying the country the media
     abets the policy by presenting no evidence that there is such a
     thing as an Iraqi people with a history, society and life that is
     undergoing a sadistic dismantling and dehumanisation. No evidence
     at all. And so the bombing continues with scarcely a peep of
     protest or awareness.
       A third factor is that the people responsible for this policy,
     whether one starts with Bill Clinton or Madeleine Albright, and
     then moves down through Sandy Berger, the CIA, the Defence
     Department and all the others, are basically uninformed and
     ignorant about what they are doing but so powerful and isolated as
     to be impervious to criticism. Take as another case in point the
     bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan last summer. Since that time,
     isolated reports have shown the whole enterprise to have been
     politically motivated as a way of trying to save Clinton's skin
     during his investigation and impeachment. Seymour Hersh, the
     celebrated investigative reporter who looked into the Sudan
     episode, wrote a scathing account of how there was no significant
     evidence that the pharmaceutical factory targeted by the CIA had
     anything to do with chemical warfare. I talked to Hersh last week
     and he told me how amazed he was at the CIA's folly and ignorance
     about Iraq, its clumsy attempts to set up coups (several of them
     not only failures but unreported by the media) and generally
     encourage the lamentable exile groups, all of it based on poor
     information and worse analysis. Unluckily, Arabs as a whole have
     such an unflattering image in this country, with no powerful lobby,
     and no tradition of public challenge to authority that the current
     policy against the Iraqi people can continue this way more or less
     forever.
       The question that troubles me is how long our people will
     continue to tolerate so inhumane and contemptuous a US policy. This
     tolerance is widely interpreted in the US media as "total support
     for what we are doing in Iraq from our Arab allies". A few days ago
     a relatively small number of unarmed Lebanese students came down to
     Arnoun (recently occupied by the Israeli army) in south Lebanon and
     with their bare hands liberated the town from Israeli soldiers.
     Israel and the United States have similar policies towards the
     Arabs, which is why of course they support and give comfort to each
     other, but surely the lesson of Arnoun is that only courageous and
     stubborn resistance will get these oppressors to lay off their
     bullying. That certainly has been one of the lessons of the Vietnam
     War, of Cuba's refusal to be cowed by its gigantic neighbour to the
     north, and of the Arnoun episode.
       As to why our rulers think that only a polite deference (seen as
     tacit acceptance for an American genocide against the Iraqi people)
     will get us America's respect and consideration is a mystery to me.
     At any rate, an awakened Arab citizenry needs to apply its weight
     and influence where both count. We need to organise against the
     campaign to "scourge" Iraq not only because it is morally wrong --
     after all, the US cynically exploits the UN for this purpose,
     without paying its dues or observing any other UN resolutions,
     which it systematically flouts in Israel's case -- but because it
     is very likely that another Arab or Muslim country will be next.
       This continuing series of US aggressions, in my opinion, is the
     clash of civilisations, or rather the clash of untrammeled
     barbarism with civilisation, with a vengeance.
     
                           weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg
Al-Ahram Weekly   Al-Ahram Weekly
                             11 - 17 March 1999
                               Issue No. 420

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