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CounterPunch
March 11,
2003
The Objectification
of Iraq
Democracy at
the Edge of a Sword
By RAMZI KYSIA
Fundamentalist movements share several common
factors, most significantly a belief in their own self-righteousness
and infallibility, and an unconditional dismissal of alternative
visions of the world. The Bush cadre's ongoing crusade is no
exception.
The Bush administration sermonizes war
as the sole alternative to apparent problems whose definition
cannot be discussed outside of a context only they can provide.
Not only is war presented as in the vital interests of the American
people, but as the only possible response to these self-defined
problems and interests. Any dissent must therefore, by definition,
be uninformed, unexaminable, and "anti-"American.
National Security Advisor Condolezza
Rice's comments likening attempts to find a peaceful resolution
to the crisis to the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s are an
example , as are Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen's recent
dismissal that, "particularly the war's opponents -- no
longer feel compelled to prove a case or stick to the facts."
A case against war cannot ever be "proved" because
it lies outside of the context provided for by the war's proponents.
Similarly, war is presented as in the
vital interests of the Iraqi people, and antiwar activism must
therefore be anti-Iraqi as well as anti-American. Even mainstream
critics of the war tend to follow these directives. Joe Stork,
Middle-East director for the Washington D.C. office of Human
Rights Watch (HRW), recently wrote, "The bottom line is
that the anti-war movement needs to make clear that it is a movement
that supports the Iraqi people, and that this support necessarily
means explicitly opposing the Iraqi government and condemning
its many crimes." That HRW has consistently failed to condemn
the violence of sanctions with anywhere near the stridency they
condemn the violence of the Iraqi government, despite the vastly
greater number of deaths caused by sanctions since 1990, is
apparently irrelevant. As is the fact that most anti-war arguments
and activism are already prefaced by condemnation of the Iraqi
government. Debate can only be allowed to proceed along the paths
laid out by war's fundamentalists.
However, there are insurmountable problems
with the fundamentalist view of war, and of its subsequent silencing
of all criticism as tainted and illegitimate: the failure to
accurately and fully define the issues, and the failures to appreciate
what democracy and solidarity truly mean for both the American
and Iraqi peoples. These failures amount to the objectification
of Iraq--the attempted reduction of Iraq from a vital nation
with its own unique history, to an artificial entity entirely
dependent on Western actions, including war or opposition to
war, to make it real.
There are four issues presented as justifying
war: the potential use of weapons of mass destruction [WMD] by
Iraq, the potential collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda to
use WMD, the liberation of the Iraqi people, and the eventual
liberation of others in the Middle-East, particularly the Palestinians.
War fundamentalists present these two
security and two moral issues as the only basis for war. Discussion
of these issues is then only permitted within the framework the
fundamentalists provide, and any discussion of other interests
driving the war is defined as offensive and therefore intolerable.
The two security arguments in favor of
war both presume that Iraq does in fact have WMD and is hiding
an ongoing WMD-development and production program, although without
providing any substantive evidence supporting this thesis. Also
presented as irrefutable is the argument that such a program
cannot be identified or constrained simply through a weapons
inspection process, but requires the full cooperation of the
Iraqi government. In this environment, the counter-argument that
the U.S. may not be interested in WMD in Iraq, and has seriously
undermined disarmament efforts both in Iraq and around the world
has become near taboo to discuss.
AN ALTERNATIVE ANALYSIS
During the 1980s Iraq developed a massive
weapons program with the assistance of scores of American, British,
Russian, French and German corporations. Despite close ties
to the U.S., the true extent of this program was successfully
kept hidden from U.S. and other intelligence agencies, even after
the '91 Gulf War. From the beginning of the inspections process
Iraq continued to hide the extent of these programs and disrupted
the inspector's work, initially with some success.
However, weapons inspectors quickly adapted
to this environment and responded by beginning an in-country
intelligence gathering operation, and by creating a series of
monitoring systems that allowed them to assess the potential
limits of Iraqi development and production of WMD. UNSCOM, The
UN Special Commission overseeing WMD issues in Iraq, was overwhelmingly
successful in identifying and destroying Iraq's remaining stores
of proscribed weapons. And by monitoring input materials, research
structures, and the capacities of Iraq's industrial infrastructure,
UNSCOM was able to assess, as early as 1995, that Iraq had no
significant remaining WMD capability.
While Iraq has still not fully answered
all of the outstanding questions that remain regarding its past
programs, no evidence as yet has been presented that these programs
continue to exist. Even Hussein Kamel, head of Iraq's concealment
efforts and the "source," following his defection,
for much of the Bush Administration's insistence that Iraq maintains
WMD, in fact stated in 1995 that Iraq's WMD had been destroyed,
and that what was being "hidden" was the documentation
needed to restart the programs at some point in the future.
So long as Iraq continues to allow monitoring
systems to be put in place, including unrestricted, on-site verification,
weapons inspections offer a high-degree of reliability in preventing
Iraq from developing or stockpiling militarily significant quantities
of WMD. This, however, remains unmentionable, and perhaps even
unthinkable, when discussing the Iraq crisis.
U.S. concerns about Iraq's WMD capability
are highly suspect, given the Bush administration's undermining
of international disarmament efforts across all three categories
of WMD: chemical, biological, and nuclear. Nor do U.S. concerns
seem to extend to much more advanced and antagonistic "enemies,"
such as North Korea, let alone toward aggressive U.S. clients
in the region such as Israel or Turkey. Moreover, the U.S. has
unabashedly undermined disarmament efforts in Iraq previously,
by providing little or inaccurate information to inspectors,
and even infiltrating and manipulating the inspections process
in a poorly concealed attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein.
This attempt in 1998 effectively "killed" the inspections
process in Iraq for almost four years, preventing a resolution
of the crisis that would have resulted in an end to sanctions--which
may have been the U.S. intention all along.
Assertions that Iraq is working with
al-Qaeda have proven even more spurious. Intelligence experts
such as Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counter-terrorism,
and Daniel Benjamin, former National Security Council member
deride these allegations. During the '91 Gulf War, Osama
bin Laden offered to lead a "jihad" against Saddam,
and the recent message attributed to bin Laden, broadcast on
al-Jazeera, similarly condemned the Iraqi government--despite
Secretary of State Powell's attempts to link opposition of the
war to working support for Saddam Hussein's regime.
Furthermore, even putting aside the current
facts, it is of little benefit to Iraq or al-Qaeda to work together
in the future. It would be difficult to smuggle chemical or biological
weapons through multiple borders and security networks. Producing
such materials at or near a point of attack is more feasible
logistically. Iraqi involvement would also likely increase the
chances that terrorists would be caught prior to an attack, and
even if successful--Iraqi involvement in such a plot would almost
certainly be discovered by US intelligence agencies after the
fact, leading to massive retaliation against Iraq. Even if Iraq
and al-Qaeda were to dismiss their mutual animosity toward one
another, it is unlikely they would ever work together to attack
the U.S.
Given the hollow nature of war fundamentalist
arguments on security, as well as the consistent lies that the
war camp has put forward in previous conflicts (from the Gulf
of Tonkin incident, to nonexistent Iraqi troops massed on the
Saudi Border in 1990, to the 100,000 Kosovars supposedly killed
by Serbian forces during the war in 1999), it's astonishing that
pronouncements made in favor of war are automatically given the
benefit of the doubt. War's proponents--those who call for war,
who champion it, who spend their entire creative potentials working
for it --continue to be granted incredible legitimacy in our
common lives, despite the morally suspect nature of their goals,
and a consistently poor track record in telling the truth.
MORAL "CLARITY"
The passionate outrage fundamentalists
tend to display toward corrupt behaviors is almost always one-sided.
As religious fundamentalists condemn atrocities committed against
self-designated "worthy victims," while condoning similar,
or even identical, atrocities committed "in the name"
of their causes, war fundamentalists practice similar moral selectivity.
While the al-Anfal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Iraqi
Kurds over a decade ago remains a continuing outrage, ongoing
ethnic cleansing by the Turkish government of its Kurdish minority
is hardly noteworthy . Needless to say, the deaths of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi civilians due to U.S. bombings of civilian
infrastructures and 12 years of blockade is simply unmentionable.
In stark contrast to war fundamentalists,
human rights and peace workers have consistently sought to publicize
and strongly condemned abuses committed by the Iraqi government.
After Iraq's use of chemical weapons in the village of Halabja
in 1988, the Reagan, and later Bush, administrations attempted
to downplay the attack. The Reagan administration went so far
as to blame Iran for the Halabja attack, and only acknowledged
Iraq's involvement under pressure from human rights activists
and Congressional Democrats. Despite Halabja, the U.S. government
continued to maintain strong ties with Saddam Hussein, only discovering
the barbarity of the 1988 attack when Iraq threatened world oil
supplies by invading Kuwait in 1990.
Not only does this gross selectivity
define the boundaries of acceptable debate, but--in a truly Orwellian
twist--war fundamentalists claim that it represents something
called "moral clarity." Under their definitions they
may even be correct: that is, U.S. policies and those of its
client states are defined as an unquestionable "good,"
therefore any attack those policies, no matter how violent or
repressive the policies are, is an attack on "good"
and "anti-American." The banal absurdity of such arguments
is self-apparent.
IN WHOSE INTERESTS?
War fundamentalism attempts to constrain
opposition to war as implicit support for the Iraqi regime, or,
at the least, a failure to seriously oppose the ongoing oppression
of the Iraqi people under their government. The ongoing oppression
of the Iraqi people under U.S.-led international sanctions is
not mentioned, or, when it cannot be ignored, is similarly blamed
on Saddam Hussein.
U.S. policy effectively shuttles opposition
to the regime toward support for sanctions and war, and opposition
to war toward support for the regime. These two, artificial and
unrepresentative camps are supposed to define the totality of
the situation, with anyone refusing to debate on these terms
sidelined and labeled as "indecisive" and unwilling
to confront "real" issues.
Debate over whether war will result in
the liberation of the Iraqi people is therefore limited to debate
over whether the U.S. will be "successful" in the tactics
it uses to prosecute the war, recreate Iraq, and remake the entire
Middle East. The history of U.S. interventions in the region,
none of which have previously resulted in "democracy,"
is ignored, as are current U.S. policies supporting non-democratic
and human right's abusing states throughout the Middle East.
The U.S. already commands great influence
in the region (as proved by the Bush administration's ability
to secure, despite the Turkish setback, basing and overflight
rights for the war in the presence of overwhelming public opposition
to the war in the region). Why this influence has not been previously
used to develop "democracy" in the Middle East is not
discussed. Once again, by restricting the debate, war's champions
are automatically given the benefit of the doubt as to their
intentions, regardless of the facts.
This persists even though the arguments
put forward by the war camp about how war will result in "democracy"
across the Middle East are quite openly arguments of intimidation,
especially with regards to Palestine, and straightforwardly
reduce to, "if we pound Iraq hard enough then the Arabs
will finally agree to whatever demands we make, out of fear and
depression over what happened to Iraq." That this is commonly
accepted as a "liberation" argument is staggering.
The war against Iraq is not just a war
against Iraq. It is a war over what the structure of our world
will be. That Iraq has trillions of dollars worth of oil reserves
is not in question. That U.S. control of those reserves is openly
being discussed is not in question. That control of those reserves
will generate new and enormous profits for U.S. corporations
exploiting them in a post-Saddam environment is not in question.
That control of Iraqi oil will allow the U.S. to destroy OPEC
and intimidate the Saudi government into more forcefully attacking
internal, Islamic fundamentalists is quite openly presented as
a "good," as is the notion that a display of U.S. might
in Iraq will intimidate Iran, Syria and other U.S. adversaries,
as well as recalcitrant U.S. allies. U.S. control of Iraqi oil
will also provide huge economic leverage with Europe and Japan--both
of which are extremely dependent on Middle Eastern oil for their
energy needs.
Yet, despite the open acknowledgement
of all these facts, the failure of France, Russia or other nations
to enthusiastically support U.S. war policies is alternatively
dismissed as "timidity," "jealousy" over
U.S. power, or a result of the financial interests they themselves
have in Iraq that may be disrupted by war. Notwithstanding open
acknowledgement of America's own financial and geopolitical interests
in Iraq, attempts by the antiwar movement to show that these
interests are driving the push toward war are ignored, or dismissed
as "lies," "anti-Americanism," and "conspiracy
theory." The audacity of this dismissal is breathtaking.
DEMOCRACY AND SOLIDARITY
Democracy is not only about elections.
It is perhaps not even principally about elections. Democracy,
on its elemental level, is about the inherent right of all human
beings to participate in and create their own history. All human
rights reduce to this one freedom. The most basic of these rights,
and of all freedom, is the right to live. The fear inculcated
by arbitrary arrest, torture, and disappearances or open killings,
forms the foundation of tyranny. But the denial of the right
to life under any circumstances--whether through secret police
and secret courts, the forcible impoverishment of blockades,
wars of extermination or wars of "liberation"--ultimately
reduces to the same denial of freedom, and the same tyranny of
fear.
War is catastrophe. It is terrorism on
a truly, massive scale. It is the physical, political and spiritual
devastation of entire peoples. War is the imposition of such
massive, deadly violence so as to force the political solutions
of one nation upon another. As such, war is the antithesis of
democracy and freedom. It's not hard to image crowds of cheering
natives toppling statues of Saddam following a "successful"
U.S. war, but this fantasy says more about America's self-image
than it does about Iraqi hopes for freedom. The ultimate consequences
of war, while not entirely irrelevant, are also not its basic
challenge. War's fundamental, insurmountable problem is that
as a means of politics and control it is the most bloody, undemocratic,
and violently repressive of all human institutions.
War fundamentalists, like religious fundamentalists,
consistently ignore the inherent rights of Humankind. Instead,
they insist that "freedom," as they define it, can
only be secured through their violently imposing their own interests
and ideologies on everyone else. The human costs of their conquests
are self-observably irrelevant to them. War fundamentalists,
like religious fundamentalists, display a deep-seated fear of
democracy--the fear that if people are freely allowed to create
their own histories, they will themselves choose alternative
ideologies, and pursue their own individual and collective interests.
This fear is well justified. History demonstrates that human
beings make poor slaves, and seldom choose servitude when given
a true choice.
Joe Stork and other mainstream critics
are correct when they state that the antiwar movement must become
a solidarity movement with the Iraqi people and must continue
to condemn the Iraqi government's violence as well as the violence
of war. Yet solidarity is not that simple. It does not end with
opposition to the violence and oppressions of Saddam, or of sanctions,
or of war. In the past, Western solidarity movements have often
constrained themselves to what happens "over there."
While this is an essential element of solidarity, by itself it
becomes as arrogant as the tyrannies it seeks to overcome. If
the antiwar movement truly becomes a solidarity movement, then
it will be through the work we do at home, rather than the rhetoric
we use.
Solidarity begins with support for the
absolute right of Iraqis to create and inculcate their own destiny,
as they define it for themselves, without foreign or domestic
intimidation, violence, or control. Solidarity requires that
we deny war's fundamentalists the legitimacy we presently grant
them, whether through our support, our silence, or our acceptance
of their definition of the issues. And solidarity requires that
we ourselves explicitly condemn and overcome the institutions
within our own society which further violence--whether it be
in our violent support of some dictators or in violent opposition
to others, or in the lifestyles we maintain that drive those
policies. We must overcome our own militarism and materialism--however
painful that may be. Solidarity necessarily requires more than
just talk--it demands that we take risks within our own lives
commensurate with the risks that have been regularly imposed
on the Iraqi people--for well over a generation--by our own government.
Ramzi Kysia
is an Arab-American activist and writer currently living in Baghdad.
He works with the Voices in the
Wilderness Iraq Peace Team http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org,
a group of American and international peaceworkers pledging to
remain in Iraq throughout a conflict, in order to be a voice
for the Iraqi people in the U.S.
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