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April 21,
2003
Give Us Back
Our Democracy
Americans
Have Been Cheated and Lied To
by
EDWARD SAID
In a speech in the Senate on 19 March, the first
day of war against Iraq, Robert Byrd, the Democrat Senator from
West Virginia, asked: 'What is happening to this country? When
did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends?
When did we decide to risk undermining international order by
adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome
military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when the turmoil
in the world cries out for diplomacy?'
No one bothered to answer, but as the
American military machine currently in Iraq stirs restlessly
in other directions, these questions give urgency to the failure,
if not the corruption, of democracy.
Let us examine what the US's Middle East
policy has wrought since George W. Bush came to power. Even before
the atrocities of 11 September, Bush's team had given Ariel Sharon's
government freedom to colonise the West Bank and Gaza, kill and
detain people at will, demolish their homes, expropriate their
land and imprison them by curfew and military blockades. After
9/11, Sharon simply hitched his wagon to 'the  war on terrorism' and intensified
his unilateral depredations against a defenceless civilian population
under occupation, despite UN Security Council Resolutions enjoining
Israel to withdraw and desist from its war crimes and human-rights
abuses.
In October 2001, Bush launched the invasion
of Afghanistan, which opened with concentrated, high-altitude
bombing (an 'anti-terrorist' military tactic, which resembles
ordinary terrorism in its effects and structure) and by December
had installed a client regime with no effective power beyond
Kabul. There has been no significant US effort at reconstruction,
and it seems the country has returned to its former abjection.
Since the summer of 2002, the Bush administration
has conducted a propaganda campaign against the despotic government
of Iraq and with the UK, having unsuccessfully tried to push
the Security Council into compliance, started the war. Since
last November, dissent disappeared from the mainstream media
swollen with a surfeit of ex-generals sprinkled with recent terrorism
experts drawn from Washington right-wing think-tanks.
Anyone who was critical was labelled
anti-American by failed academics, listed on websites as an 'enemy'
scholar who didn't toe the line. Those few public figures who
were critical had their emails swamped, their lives threatened,
their ideas trashed by media commentators who had become sentinels
of America's war.
A torrent of material appeared equating
Saddam Hussein's tyranny not only with evil, but with every known
crime. Some of this was factually correct but neglected the role
of the US and Europe in fostering Saddam's rise and maintaining
his power. In fact, the egregious Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam
in the early 80s, assuring him of US approval for his catastrophic
war against Iran. US corporations supplied nuclear, chemical
and biological materials for the supposed weapons of mass destruction
and then were brazenly erased from public record.
All this was deliberately obscured by
government and media in manufacturing the case for destroying
Iraq. Either without proof or with fraudulent information, Saddam
was accused of harbouring weapons of mass destruction seen as
a direct threat to the US. The appalling consequences of the
US and British intervention in Iraq are beginning to unfold,
with the calculated destruction of the country's modern infrastructure,
the looting of one of the world's richest civilisations, the
attempt to engage motley 'exiles' plus large corporations in
rebuilding the country, and the appropriation of its oil and
its modern destiny. It's been suggested that Ahmad Chalabi, for
example, will sign a peace treaty with Israel, hardly an Iraqi
idea. Bechtel has already been awarded a huge contract.
This is an almost total failure in democracy
- ours, not Iraq's: 70 per cent of the American people are supposed
to support this, but nothing is more manipulative than polls
asking 465 Americans whether they 'support our President and
troops in time of war'. As Senator Byrd said: 'There is a pervasive
sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered ...
a pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn
duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even
while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty
in Iraq.'
I am convinced this was a rigged, unnecessary
and unpopular war. The reactionary Washington institutions that
spawned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams and Feith provide an unhealthy
intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without
real peer review, adopted by a government requiring justification
for illicit policy. The doctrine of military pre-emption was
never voted on by the American people or their representatives.
How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered to
the government by companies like Halliburton and Boeing? Charting
a strategic course for the most lavishly endowed military establishment
in history is left to ideologically based pressure groups (eg
fundamentalist Christian leaders), wealthy private foundations
and lobbies like AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
It seems so monumentally criminal that important words like democracy
and freedom have been hijacked, used as a mask for pillage, taking
over territory and settling scores. The US programme for the
Arab world has become the same as Israel's. Along with Syria,
Iraq once represented the only serious military threat to Israel
and, therefore, it had to be smashed.
Besides, what does it mean to liberate
and democratise a country when no one asked you to do it and
when, in the process, you occupy it militarily while failing
to preserve law and order? What a travesty of strategic planning
when you assume 'natives' will welcome your presence after you've
bombed and quarantined them for 13 years.
A preposterous mindset about American
beneficence has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media.
In writing about a 70-year-old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural
centre in her home that was wrecked by US raids and who is now
beside herself with rage, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins
implicitly chastises her for her 'comfortable life under Saddam
Hussein' and piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans,
'and this from a graduate of London University'.
Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons
not found, the Stalingrads that didn't occur, the artillery defences
that never happened, I wouldn't be surprised if Saddam disappeared
suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him, his family,
and his money leave in return for the country. The war had gone
badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn't risk the same
in Baghdad. On 6 April, a Russian convoy leaving Iraq was bombed;
Condi Rice appeared in Russia on 7 April; Baghdad fell 9 April.
Nevertheless, Americans have been cheated,
Iraqis have suffered impossibly and Bush looks like a cowboy.
On matters of the gravest importance, constitutional principles
have been violated and the electorate lied to. We are the ones
who must have our democracy back.
Edward Said
is Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University,
New York
Today's
Features
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Robert
Jensen
Self-Determination in Iraq? Then the
US Must Leave
Dr.
Susan Block
The Rape of Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Aiming at Syria: Stop Them Before They Kill Again
Robert
Fisk
The Final Sacking of Baghdad
Col. Dan
Smith
Post-War Iraq: Asking the Right Questions
Ali
Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
A Cycle of Chaos and Confrontation: Misadventures of the NeoCons
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/15
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