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March
19, 2002
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
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March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
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Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
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Armen
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The
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Georgia Is Only the Beginning
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Abdullah
v. Osama
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Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
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RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
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Anthrax
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March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
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Wire
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Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
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/ Weissman
Personal
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Arabs
Don't Want US
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Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
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Footprints
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Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
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March 19, 2002
War-Mongering Academics
The New Tartuffe
By Amir Ahmadi
In February sixty American academics and professionals
published a statement in Europe called 'What We're Fighting For.'
It is a defense of the US military action in Afghanistan and
more generally of what has taken the media name of 'war on terrorism.'
The statement is addressed to 'all people of good will,' and
in particular to 'our brothers and sisters in Muslim societies.'
Since I consider myself a person of good
will I have allowed myself to write a brief reply to their statement.
I am an Iranian who has lived in the West for the past twenty
or so years, six in the US, where I have family and friends.
I still have strong emotional ties with Iran and, although I
do not consider myself a Muslim, I feel I share the fate of my
birthplace and its people, the overwhelming majority of whom
are Muslim. I abhor all religious fanaticism and believe in the
separation of church and state, which is one of the norms that
the signatories of the statement affirm.
All these facts make me, I think, an
ideal addressee for the statement, at least if we take the printed
words at their face value. My reply is also directed to all people
of good will.
One's reaction to the statement depends
in large part on whether one believes it is proffered in good
faith or not. I do not think it is. I do not even think it is
intended to persuade 'Muslim brothers and sisters.' I think in
its duplicitous affirmations it is an affront to 'all people
of good will.' I think in its reasoning it is an insult to the
mind.
I will shortly explain my reasons for
making these unkind statements. But let me first say a few words
to those who accept 'What We're Fighting For' at face value,
perhaps mostly American.
Despite the stately and somewhat pompous
tone of 'What We're Fighting For,' the first thing that occurred
to me after reading it was a little Mulla Nasrudin story. Mulla
is a popular figure of Iranian satirical folklore, and the story
goes:
One day, sitting at his doorstep, Mulla
Nasrudin is approached by a few villagers asking to borrow his
donkey. 'I know I said you could use the beast when you need
it,' Mulla replies, 'but unfortunately it is already taken by
someone else.' No sooner has Mulla finished his sentence than
the donkey starts braying in the barn.
- 'If it is not here, what is that noise
then?'
- 'You are taking a donkey's word over mine?'
The affirmations that the statement contains
and form its moral backbone, so to say, simply do not stand up
in the face of historical evidence. The human rights principles
that the signatories invoke to justify US military action can
be summarized by the affirmation of equal freedom and dignity
of all human persons as such. Downstream from this come the right
of self-defense and government obligation to protect its 'innocent
people' against loss of life, possibly by pre-emptive strikes
against potential aggressors, which together make use of 'coercive
force' not only justified but morally necessary.
Now, taking these affirmations in good
faith requires us to conclude that any use of coercive force
that does not meet these criteria is not only morally wrong,
especially if it involves massive loss of human life, but must
itself be militarily suppressed. Do they realize what they are
saying? Flirting with the language of universals, with those
little words - all, every, any - can get them in trouble!
The signatories 'recognize' that 'at
times' US foreign policy has been arrogant or unjust, but consider
this irrelevant to their justification. Why? Because in this
case the 'innocent people' are only from Guatemala or Iran or
Palestine? Besides, the qualification 'at times' makes sense
only if it can be shown that injustice and arrogance have been
exceptions rather than rule in US foreign policy toward so-called
Third World countries: mistakes in implementation of otherwise
upright policies, aberrations in application of otherwise just
principles, or misjudgments of otherwise good intentions.
History belies all this. Read any half-decent
political history textbook of the twentieth century. Or even
better, take any de-classified CIA or NSC documents, whether
on Korean War or Vietnam or Chile or Iran I challenge the signatories
to point to even a single instance that American foreign policy
has not been dictated by strategic interests and that this
is crucial these strategic interests, when a so-called
Third World country has been at issue, have not been seen by
the decision makers in Washington to be better served by installing
or supporting a brutal regime.
The consistency is amazing! Again and
again you find the same story, going back to the beginning of
the twentieth century. The mask that was used then to conceal
and deceive was 'Manifest Destiny' or the 'task of God;' now
it is 'freedom' or 'human rights.' 'The cannon opens a continent,
and through this opening we will see God pass' There has been
progress, to be sure, in the cynicism of the imposture.
The signatories say it is justified to
deploy military force against any 'government' that harbors or
otherwise supports 'the network of Islamicist terrorists.' Does
it not worry them that this network was put together by the US
from scratch? That these 'stirred-up Moslems,' in Brzezinski's
words, are literally the waste left behind by the US campaign
to set up 'the Afghan trap' (his words again) for the Soviet
Union? For over twenty years Afghanistan has been paying for
this in hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of refugees
and a whole country in ruins. 'We fight to defend ourselves,'
says the statement, 'but we also believe that we fight to defend
those universal principles of human rights and human dignity
that are the best hope for humankind.'
Is it possible to take this embarrassing
prattle of human rights seriously? This singular will, multiplied
sixty times, to let oneself be deceived so as to deceive others
with good conscience? They 'recognize' that fanatic religious
movements 'have complex political, social, and demographic dimensions,
to which due attention must be paid.' But it is not clear what
purpose this 'due attention' would serve or, indeed, in what
it consists. Would this due attention also fall on stirring up
ignorant religious sentiments and providing monetary and logistic
support to fanatic bands as US did against Naser in Egypt or
against Mussadeq in Iran? What the signatories need in their
readers is not good will but historical amnesia. Don't look back
or under, just listen to us, take our word! Stare at your TV
screen! Let yourself be lulled! The 'End of History' is at hands
for you! 'A Yea and Amen to ignorance!'
Of course all this is beside the point.
The New Tartuffe's manifesto is not meant to bring to light any
evidence or rationally defend any thesis. And it is definitely
not written in good faith. Its aim is to construct a new and
versatile Devil to serve US capital and power interests, and
to mobilize public support. If, as the signatories assert, the
enemy is after 'our destruction' because of 'who we are,' it
is pretty much decided what the appropriate reaction should be:
in effect, 'Your life or theirs!' To induce this attitude in
the Western public, to judge from what beams from mainstream
media and appears even in more learned discussions, is conducted
like a marketing campaign, like a 'corporate management of demand.'
And of course as always 'public-oriented
intellectuals' (that is to say, the venal type) are at the helm.
'They want to kill us because they hate us, and they hate us
because they envy us, they envy our power, our freedom, our life
of pleasure, our cities, our buildings, etc.' Or because these
West-haters have a 'death cult,' like another recent learned
discussion in a prestigious journal has it.
Is this not a bit too convenient?! 'Fall
into line: we will kill the Big Bad Wolf before it can kill us!'
Read Huntington's report (he is one of the signatories of What
We're Fighting For) on the state of US democracy submitted to
the Trilateral Commission in 1975. He there stresses that 'détente
has had negative implications for the cohesion of Trilateral
[i.e., North America, Western Europe and Japan] societies.' What
is required for US government to regain its sagging authority,
he counsels, is 'a sense of purpose.' How does a 'democracy'
acquire a sense of purpose? It can only be 'the product of the
collective perception by the significant groups in society of
a major challenge to their well-being and the perception by them
that this challenge threatens them all about equally.'
There you have it from the horse's mouth.
The now famous tract on 'the clash of civilizations' that appeared
in 1993 is, of course, by the same author. Here too our 'policy-oriented
intellectual' shows the way: the West has to prepare itself for
a showdown with the Islamic world and possibly with a Confucian-Islamic
league. 'The coming war has got nothing to do with what we do
but with who we are, etc.' The same boring cant repeated again
and again under different names: Fukuyama, Huntington, Moynihan,
etc. It is very disturbing to see supposed intellectuals have
become the choice instrument of tyranny, however gentle this
tyranny might be. 'I should have everything to fear,' wrote Beccaria
in the middle of the eighteenth century, 'if the spirit of tyranny
went hand-in-hand with a taste for reading.'
Never before has a region been more strategically
important to US than is Caspian Sea region today, said Cheney
in 1998. We know that throughout the nineties US tried to recapture
the control of Caspian Sea region oil from the Europeans. To
this end, it took steps to effect a rapprochement with Iran by
jumping on the bandwagon of the 'new moderate government of Khatami.'
It expanded its relations with the former Soviet Republics in
Central Asia and Azerbaijan, partly through Turkey. It went as
far as negotiating with the Taliban in 1996 for the purpose of
using Afghanistan to transit Central Asian oil to Pakistan.
The problem, however, was that all these
arrangements were at best makeshifts replete with risks, relying
on others' good will and control in a volatile region and subject,
in any case, to too much competitive pressures. Military presence
and military ties with the region's governments solve all these
problems. This has always been the American way since World War
II. The 'military option' not only puts US government in control
of the most important resource of the capitalist world-economy
and hence puts US oil companies in the driving seat, but it also
allows US to asserts its supremacy vis-à-vis other capitalist
powers. Since the crisis of the early seventies whose most important
outcome was US loss of control of world liquidity, US 'warfare
state' has had to market (which sometimes has meant promoting
and managing demand for) its 'protection services' as a source
of revenue. Reagan sought the assistance of Japanese capital
through the alienation of US assets. Bush forthrightly called
it 'donations' (i.e., protection payments) during and after Persian
Gulf War. The ability to assume protection costs of the global
working of capital is the weapon that US uses, increasingly as
a matter of course, to maintain its position at the commanding
heights of worldwide capitalist regime. Here too one may repeat:
the route of 'compulsion is more certain than that of cunning.'
Read annual United Nations Human Development
Reports. Since the middle of the seventies the gap between the
rich and the poor has steadily increased, both internationally
and within almost all national societies. Both world trade and
foreign direct investment have contracted to the three regions
of North America, Europe and South East Asia. Many countries,
especially poorer ones, have been reduced to the desperate suppliers
of primary material and cheap labor to the markets of rich countries
and thus completely dependent, even for the livelihood of their
populations, on commodity markets. Nowadays, whole countries
can go bankrupt. Environmental problems of all sorts, from climate
change to biodiversity loss and other ecological stresses, now
seriously place the future of life under question on planetary
scale. These are the problems that world citizens must be grappling
with. These are the problems that must be addressed by governments,
especially the more powerful ones. For this, sober reflection
and honesty are required, and not stirring up ignorant sentiments
and hysteria. In any case, 'smart bombs' cannot compensate for
stupid politics.
American friends!
The worst kind of loss of freedom is
narcissistic neurosis. That 'policy-oriented intellectuals' and
'Office of Strategic Influence' and emotional blackmail against
reflection are still needed by the 'captains of industry and
consciousness' gives us hope that the outlook for intelligence
and courage is not all that bleak. As Danton said: 'De l'audace,
encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace!'
Amir Ahmadi
is an Iranian living in Australia. He can be reached at: rimamir@yahoo.com
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