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CounterPunch
December
27, 2002
Report from
Cairo
by NORMAN MADARASZ
Cairo was host to the most important anti-war
congress held in the Arab world to date on December 18-19. Organized
in haste given the imminent US strike and declared invasion of
Iraq, not to mention the utter devastation of Palestinians and
Palestinian land by Sharon's army, the Cairo Congress against
American Aggression on Iraq aimed at gathering together for an
intensive study session intellectuals, journalists, activists,
organizers and former-UN workers from Arab and non-Arab countries.
Its commitment as a civil society group was stressed and reinforced
throughout the Congress. No matter how one defines the current
American aggression, the anti-war movement that has emerged explosively
in England, Italy, France, the US and elsewhere, is the first
such movement to take shape prior to the actual onset of a war.
It should surprise no one in the US that
the corporate media chose not to report on the event. After all,
the million-strong demonstration and study session held in Florence
in November against the American aggression was entirely under-reported
in the US. Even though al-Jazeera and al-Ahram, two of the most
respected sources of news in the Arab world, were present, interviewing
both organizers and participants, not one corporate news source
showed up from the English-speaking world. France's "Le
Monde" spoke of the event, albeit briefly and almost invisibly,
in the December 20-21 issue. "Humanite" had a correspondent
follow the events.
The Congress successfully and strikingly
brought together a broad range of distinguished speakers, among
whom the hero of the Algerian War of Independence and former
President, Ahmad Ben Bella, was the guest of honor. Also invited,
but unable to attend due to illness though he did have a letter
read out was Edward Said, the Palestinian-American author of
"Orientalism" and "Culture and Imperalism".
The Congress also featured such distinguished speakers as former
US-attorney general Ramsey Clark, former Director of the UN Humanitarian
Program for Iraq, Dennis Halliday, and British anti-war MP George
Gallaway. Egyptian-American scholar and consultant to the UN,
Dr. Soheir Morsy, and Engineer M. Samy drove the Congress within
its project, having worked brilliantly in their capacity as co-organizers
of the event.
The results of the Congress are twofold.
First, all participants democratically elaborated the "Cairo
Declaration", which is being forwarded to all international
political and social bodies. Then, a steering committee was established
to undertake action to raise popular awareness to the catastrophic
effects a war would have on the Arab world, and to what the broader
ambitions of the US and Israel appear to be in the Middle East.
Needless to say, under its current government, Israel is indistinguishable
from the broader aims of American foreign policy. This bond has
worked unceasingly to the detriment of the US's credibility in
the Arab world, while being based on a short-term vision peculiar
to Sharon's Israel that can only be doomed to fail in the long-term.
Consensus was reached for full withdrawal
of US forces from Arab countries, which may thereby allow the
Arab people to deal with the question of democracy on their own
terms and through their own means. As history has shown since
ancient Athens, democracy as an export, imposed by force onto
a people onto leads to tyranny. There have been no exceptions
to this rule in history.
The present author was also honored to
be invited. I spoke of the anti-war sentiment in Brazil from
my perspective of a Canadian intellectual and academic living
in Rio de Janeiro and married to a Brazilian. As I was the only
representative of either Canada or Brazil, I believe it is appropriate
to publish the paper and the views it discusses, which were presented
to the Congress on December 19.
N.M.
What follows is Madarasz's address to
the conference.
Secular Steps in Preparing a
War
by NORMAN MADARASZ
Distinguished participants,
I would like first of all to express
my gratitude to Dr Soheir Morsy for inviting me and giving me
the honor of speaking among you and participating in a Congress
that has assembled so many illustrious speakers. Yesterday and
this morning's speeches were impressive by the intense, angry
and profound solidarity shown toward the Iraqi people and children.
In that regard, I can only second the motion put forth by Dr.
von Sponeck according to which a clause ought to be devoted in
the Cairo Declaration to the effect that Iraqi children must
be recognized as having the same right to live as any child in
the US, Britain, France or Canada.
Following so many passionate speeches,
I think it can be affirmed loud and clear that here we find a
clear example of people who no longer accept the inactivity of
our governments toward the US aggression on Iraq. And that aggression
as well as the ideology supporting it must be stopped
before it exponentially increases the suffering of all in the
region.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am Canadian,
a professor and researcher in philosophy, currently living in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with my Brazilian wife and son. Soon after
the attacks of September 11, I began writing, outside of philosophy
and academia, on international political and economic relations
for CounterPunch magazine. With such criminal irresponsibility
returning home on September 11, it was impossible to keep silent
any longer.
In the case of Brazil, or Argentina,
Iraq and Egypt for that matter, what also engaged me to write
was the near impossibility of finding pertinent, unbiased and
informative news on the country in the English language corporate
press, i.e. what we in North America usually call the "mass
media".
This state of affairs is simply frustrating.
After all, consider for a minute the turbulent and very exciting
year Brazil has undergone. By electing the Workers Party (PT)
to government, and Lula da Silva as president last October, Brazil
has become one of, if not the most, enthusiastic countries on
the planet. It has certainly proved to be the most dynamic democracy
existing anywhere today in what is a rapidly shrinking democratic
world.
In that regard, we cannot really speak
of anti-war demonstrations as yet having taken place in the country.
The reasons have so very much to do with the population awaiting
the investiture of their new president on January 1, and the
hopeful promise of deep social change to combat poverty and the
urban violence it gives rise to that is eating away at the fabric
of Brazil's largest cities. The gathering at Porto Alegre early
next year should mark an important change in condemnation of
the aggression.
Yet listen to any Brazilian news channel,
and especially Globo News, or look into the eyes of most Brazilians
while speaking of Iraq, and you will see a people not fooled
by the pretexts spun by the US as justifiable cause for its increased
aggression on Iraq or for its strategy aided and abetted by Sharon
of establishing Israel as the hyper-militarized dominant power
in the region, much less for its ambitions set in the rigid stone
of globalized shareholder capitalism.
In many ways, Brazil has had first-hand
experience in being revolted by one of the very secular episodes
to preparing the war. This occurred when the Director-General
of the UN's Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,
Mr. Jose Bustani, was groundlessly accused of mismanaging the
OPCW by Washington D.C. Bustani just happened to be Brazilian.
And the Brazilian mass media covered the events so very closely
and with such indignation that all could sense this strong-arm
tactic to be a major step for the US to increase the aggression
against Iraq.
The OPCW ran according to a convention
by which member states had to provide data on their chemical
weapons programs and were subject to challenges and inspections
from other members. In his short tenure, Bustani managed to boost
membership from 70 up to 145 nations in the space of two years.
He had also been unanimously re-elected for a second four-year
term in May 2001.
Bustani's mistake, as most probably fabricated
by John Bolton, senior neo-con ideologue and sub-secretary of
state for arms control, was having wanted to include too many
of the wrong types of countries into the folds of the OPCW. After
all, these wrong types of countries, or "rogue states",
weren't able to comply with international regulations and standards.
They weren't because by definition they were rogue states. Worse
still, Bustani was involved in high-level talks with Iraq to
have it enter the OPCW. His staff had already sent an inspections
team to Baghdad to discuss matters with Iraqi authorities.
As the US is the main financial backer
of the organization, covering roughly 25% of its operational
budget, it rallied the usual victims to try to oust Bustani through
a members' vote. When the democratic process failed, Bolton's
people called for an extraordinary closed-door session in The
Hague. On April 22, Ambassador Bustani was sacked, and the US
would have set a precedence for one nation disrupting the activity
of a UN agency had it not, just a week earlier, already lobbied
against and replaced Robert Watson as head of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. Watson, an American scientist and strong
supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, had been advocating action against
global warming.
Just as Washington has shown its true
colors by rejecting any form of environmental control over a
country that is by far the world's biggest polluter, so also
has it dictated to the world that it and it alone knows how to
manage budgets and control the non-conventional arms industry.
This event had serious implications for
Iraq, but not only for that continually bombed country. At the
time of the attack on Bustani, you'll recall, new leads were
appearing in the investigation into the wave of anthrax terror
letters, which used a strain of anthrax allegedly developed by
the US military and secretly funded. This received little mention
in the North American corporate press, even though it directly
contravened the biological and chemical weapons convention and
US domestic law. Never mind that to this day, it appears as though
an American connected to the military would have been behind
the mail attacks.
This type of background scenario makes
it all the more difficult to accept American self-denials over
its imperialist ambitions. Such self-denial is merely a process
of refining the ideology of imperial discourse. There's maybe
no one more apt and efficient in producing such self-denial in
the context of the American aggression than Princeton professor
emeritus of Middle East Studies, Bernard Lewis. Typical cases
of denial in his writings are that America is not an Empire (like
Britain and France were), or that Iraq has been a more brutal
user of non-conventional weaponry than the US. (In discussing
the "brutality" of Middle East dictators he conveniently
elides any mention to the use of napalm and agent orange in Viet
Nam, chemical weapons in the Korean war, let alone atomic weapons
against Japan and depleted uranium in the Gulf War.)
When Professor Lewis recently argued
in the National Review that the US fails the empire grade, thereby
qualifying it as an honest exporter of democracy to countries
raked by harsh dictatorial and theocratic rule, he omitted a
major historical point. Prior to becoming colonial empires in
the Middle and Far East, Britain and France both began by establishing
'trade counters'. Just as the English were wheeling-dealing in
Calcutta before the Indies became a colony, by corrupting and
subjugating one maharaja after another into their horizon of
interests, so also had the US secured growing dominance over
oil in Riyadh.
In fact, regarding American history,
we seem merely to be standing on an earlier segment of the colonial
timeline. But on it we stand as everyone here seems to
agree and, we stand on it at a very crucial moment, indeed.
This is a moment pointed to with vehemence
under other purposes by New York Times right-wing columnist Thomas
Friedman when he speaks of a new era when the United Nations
Organization will finally be made to move faster to another
beat, as it were. A recent piece, one whose title "'Soddom'
Hussein's Iraq" illustrates its lewd rhetoric, was published
as if coincidentally just as the UN arms inspectors began tackling
their delicate tasks.
For Friedman, the UN is part of the problem,
but not as our distinguished speakers Denis Halliday and Dr.
von Sponeck spoke of yesterday. These honorable gentlemen resigned
from their high-level posts in the UN's humanitarian sector in
protest over the obvious failures of the Food-for-Oil program
and the refusal of the Security Council to lift the embargo that
has criminally been strangling the Iraqi people for over ten
years. What Friedman intones is that the UN is blocking the rights
of Iraqis to democracy. Furthermore, in a typical display of
misplaced American arrogance, he has the gall to call upon a
people under threat of massive bombardment, further death and
starvation, to somehow, through sheer will and sacrifice, overthrow
a dictator.
And this is why he claims that we must
hold the "UN's feet to the fire", as if it and not
the Security-Council enforced embargo were behind the plight
of the Iraqi people! Such poetic license is, doubtless, of the
sort that garnered him the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.
Dear American friends, faced with the
terror of 9/11 and its aftermath, you have allowed your federal
government to let corporate crooks fly free from indictment after
they ripped your pockets off by billions of dollars in the greatest
corruption wave to have stricken the US since the Gilded Age.
Freedom in the US today means freedom for corporate crooks of
the highest and most prestigious pedigree. It no longer means
freedom for the common folk. How can you expect Iraqis, then,
to rise up when you yourselves can all but insist on government
to keep its interest on the economy instead of getting rich from
the taxes you pay at great expense from war?
But with the UN made immune, to whose
ears can we still turn to be listened to at the highest level?
As futile and confused as it seems, but
with a spirit of keeping possible doors open, it could still
be Secretary Colin Powell. If we accept the American self-denial
of the imperial-nature of its foreign policy, and that the aggression
on Iraq is "not about oil", as Rumsfeld recently claimed,
then we can draw out the Western trinity to which the secretary
of defense and vice-president are not only devoted servants,
but stakeholders and shareholders: oil for sure and don't be
fooled; next: the arms industry; finally, much less glamorous
but equally lucrative, the military logistics industry that supplies
infrastructure to the massive armies as they stretch their claws
worldwide. (In cut-throat international competition, heavy industry
agrees that future treasure lies in masterful logistics.) As
opposed to Messieurs Rumsfeld and Cheney, Secretary Powell seems
only marginally connected to the ownership of these sectors.
There is a silent reserve in Colin Powell
that seems to express wisdom, albeit undercut by professional
ambition. Secretary, you have been able to transform your logistics
and geostrategic knowledge into intelligent dialogue with the
world's youth on MTV. You were behind operations of the 1991
war on Iraq, you have seen the ravages. You are aware of the
horrors caused even more in the war's aftermath, which shouldn't
be surprising given the post-war sequelae of Viet Nam.
The anti-war movement, the movement for
international respect for social justice, may grant you laurels
if you prove able to move from the man of war that you are, to
the leader of peace that you promise to become. But if you do
nothing to avert this infernal step into the next segment of
the colonial timeline, history will forget you, Sir.
Whether his door remains partially open
or not, our words must continue to be: all together in solidarity
with the Iraqi people and all together in our call to halt the
British-Israeli-American aggression on Iraq, on behalf of my
Canadian and Brazilian colleagues and loved ones.
Norman Madarasz
holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Universite de Paris. His
most recent philosophical study is on French philosopher Alain
Badiou's mathematical philosophy, forthcoming in Gabriel Riera
(editor), "Alain Badiou: Philosophy under Conditions",
SUNY Press. He welcomes comments at normanmadarasz2@hotmail.com.
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