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CounterPunch
December
3, 2002
Misinformation
About Iraq
A Fantastical Future, Predicted by the Terminally Disengaged
By EDWARD SAID
The flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation
about the looming US war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship
in Iraq continues unabated. It is impossible to know, however,
how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of psychological
war against Iraq, how much the public floundering of a government
uncertain about its next step. In any event, I find it as possible
to believe that there will be a war as that there will not. Certainly
the sheer belligerency of the verbal assaults on the average
citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result
that very little is totally certain about what is actually taking
place. No one can independently confirm the various troop and
navy movements reported on a daily basis, and given the lurching
opacity of his thinking, George W Bush's real intentions are
difficult to read. But that the whole world is concerned -- indeed,
deeply anxious -- about the catastrophic chaos that will ensue
after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the people
of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.
And yet, one aspect of the deluge of
opinion, and a fact that is most disturbing quite on its own
and without reference to its actual intention, is the spate of
articles concerning post-Saddam Iraq. One that I'd like to discuss
in particular is obviously part of a continuing effort by an
Iraqi expatriate, Kanan Makiya, to promote himself as the father
of what he calls a "non-Arab" and decentralised post-Ba'ath
country. Now it is quite clear to anyone with the slightest concern
about the  travails of this rich and
once-flourishing country that the years of Ba'athist rule have
been disastrous, despite the regime's early programme of development
and building. So there can be little quarrel with trying to imagine
what Iraq might look like if Saddam is toppled either by American
intervention or by internal coup. Makiya's contribution to this
effort has been a steady one, both on the airwaves and in quality
journals where he is given a platform to air his views, about
which I shall speak in a moment. What has been made less clear,
however, is who he is and from what background he emerges. I
think it is important to know these things, if only to judge
the value of his contribution and to understand more precisely
the special quality of his thoughts and ideas.
Usually identified as having a research
connection with Harvard and as a professor at Brandeis University
(both in Boston), Makiya when I knew him first in the early 1970s
was closely affiliated with the Popular Democratic Front for
the Liberation of Palestine. As I recall, he was then an architecture
student at MIT, but he hardly said anything during the occasions
I saw him. Then he disappeared from view, or rather from my view.
He surfaced in 1990 as Samir Khalil, the author of a vaunted
book called The Republic of Fear that described Saddam Hussein's
rule with considerable dread and drama. One of the media-rousing
works of the first Gulf War, The Republic of Fear seemed to have
been written -- according to a fawning interview with Makiya
that appeared in the New Yorker magazine -- while Makiya took
time off from working as an associate of his father's architectural
firm in Iraq itself. He admitted in the interview that, in a
sense, Saddam had financed the writing of his book indirectly,
although no one accused Makiya of collaborating with a regime
he obviously detested.
In his next book, Cruelty and Silence,
Makiya attacked Arab intellectuals whom he accused of opportunism
and immorality because they either praised various Arab regimes
or remained silent about the various governments' abuses against
their own people. Of course Makiya said nothing about his own
history of silence and complicity as a beneficiary of the Iraqi
regime's munificence, even though, of course, he was entitled
to work for whomever he pleased. But he said the vilest things
about people like Mahmoud Darwish and myself for being nationalists,
allegedly supporting extremism and, in Darwish's case, for having
written an ode to Saddam. Most of what Makiya wrote in the book
was, in my opinion, revolting, based as it was on cowardly innuendo
and false interpretation, but the book, of course, enjoyed a
popular moment or two since it confirmed the view in the West
that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists. It seemed
not to matter that Makiya himself had worked for Saddam or that
he had never written anything about the Arab regimes until his
Republic of Fear, until, that is, he was out of Iraq and done
with his employment there. He was hailed here and there in America
for being a brave man of conscience and for having defied the
self-censoring practice of Arab intellectuals, but this praise
was usually heaped on Makiya by people who had no knowledge of
the fact that Makiya himself never wrote in an Arab country or
that whatever meagre writing he produced had been written behind
a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West.
Except for his two books and an article
urging the US administration to occupy Baghdad during the first
Gulf War, Makiya wasn't much heard from after that. Then last
year he produced an unreadable novel proving somehow that the
Dome of the Rock was really built by a Jew; it was sent to me
by the publisher, so I happened to have skimmed it before it
appeared officially, but was nevertheless aghast at how badly
written it was, and how, unable to resist showing off how many
books its author had read, it was peppered with footnotes, surely
an unusual thing for what purported to be a work of fiction.
It died a merciful death, however, and Makiya lapsed back into
silence.
Until the government-inspired campaign
against Iraq broke out a few months ago Makiya had said little
about the war against terror, the events of 9/11, and the war
in Afghanistan. It is true that he did a kind of commentary for
a popular American biweekly of Mohamed Atta's supposed Islamic
terrorist handbook, but even by his standards it was a negligible
performance. I vividly recall, however, that late last summer
I happened by chance to hear a radio interview with him in which
he was identified for the first time as heading a US State Department
group planning for a post-war, post-Saddam Iraq. His name had
not appeared among those mentioned as being part of the US-funded
Iraqi opposition groups, nor had he contributed anything that
could be read by a member of the general public about the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict or any other Middle Eastern issues, although I had heard
that he had visited Israel a number of times.
The most complete version of his plans
for Iraq after an American invasion that derive from his current
employment as a resident employee of the US Department of State,
appears in the November 2002 issue of Prospect, a good liberal
British monthly to which I subscribe. Makiya begins his "proposal"
by enumerating the extraordinary assumptions behind his arguments,
two of which almost by definition are unimaginable. The first
is that "the unseating" of Saddam should not occur
after a bombing campaign. Makiya must have been living on Mars
to imagine that, in the event of a war, a massive bombing attack
would not occur even though every single plan circulated for
regime change in Iraq has stated explicitly that Iraq would be
bombed mercilessly. The second assumption is equally imaginative,
since Makiya seems to believe against all evidence that the US
is committed to democracy and nation- building in Iraq. Why he
thinks that Iraq is like Germany and Japan after World War II
(both of which were rebuilt because of the Cold War) is beyond
me; besides, he doesn't once mention the fact that the US is
determined to bring down the Iraqi regime because of the country's
oil reserves and because Iraq is an enemy of Israel. So, he starts
out by making preposterous assumptions that simply fly in the
face of all the evidence.
Undeterred by such unimportant considerations,
he presses on. Iraqis are committed to federalism, he says, rather
than to a centralised government. The proof that he offers is
pretty negligible. Like all his other attempts to convince his
reader that he makes telling points, his logic is so weak because
it is based equally on fictional supposition and his own, highly
dubious personal affirmations. He is committed to federalism,
and so he says are the Kurds. Where federalism as a system is
supposed to come from (other than from his desk in the State
Department), he doesn't bother to say. Clearly, he plans to have
it imposed from the outside, although he makes the largely unsubstantiated
claim that "everyone" is agreed that federalism in
Iraq should be the outcome. This "means devolving power
away from Baghdad to the provinces", presumably by a stroke
of General Tommy Franks' pen. One would have thought that post-Tito
Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country's federalism
was a total success. But Makiya is so committed to his views
as a kinglike theoretician of government that he simply ignores
consequences, history, people, communities, and reality altogether
so that he can make his ludicrously improbable case. This, of
course, is exactly what the US government likes, that is, to
have miscellaneous Arab intellectuals responsible to no constituency
who urge the US military on to war while pretending to be bringing
"democracy" to the place in full contradiction of America's
real aims and its actual historical practices. Makiya seems not
to have heard about ruinous US interventions in Indochina, Afghanistan,
Central America, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, and the Philippines,
or that the US is currently involved militarily with about 80
countries.
The grand climax of Makiya's justification
for the invasion of Iraq by the United States is his proposal
that the new Iraq should be non-Arab. (Along the way, he speaks
contemptuously of Arab opinion which, he says, will never amount
to anything. This obviously clears the board for his airy speculations
about both the future and the past.) How this magical de-Arabising
solution is to come about, Makiya doesn't say, any more than
he shows us how Iraq is to be relieved of its Islamic identity
and its military capabilities. He refers to a mysterious alchemical
quality he calls "territoriality" and proceeds to build
another sandcastle on that as the basis for a future state of
Iraq. In the end, however, he volunteers that all this is going
to be guaranteed "from the outside", by the United
States. Where this has ever taken place before is not an issue
that troubles Makiya, any more than he seems concerned about
US unilateralism and needless destructiveness.
One scarcely knows whether to laugh or
cry at Makiya's posturings. Clearly this is a man with no recorded
experience of government, or even of citizenship. Between countries
and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except
to his upwardly mobile career), he has now found a haven deep
inside the US government which he uses to fuel his amazingly
speculative flights of fancy. For someone who has lectured his
peers about intellectual responsibility and independent judgement,
he provides examples of neither one nor the other. Exactly the
opposite. Perched on a pulpit that has freed him from any accountability
he seems now to be serving a master who has paid him well for
his services -- as Saddam employed him in the past -- and his
versatile conscience. I find it incredible that Makiya allows
himself such sanctimony and vanity, but then why shouldn't he?
He has never engaged in a public debate with any of his fellow
Iraqis, never written for an Arab audience, never put himself
forward for an office or for any political role requiring personal
courage and commitment. He has either written pseudonymously
or attacked people who have had no chance to respond to his defamations.
It is sad that Makiya implicitly suggests
that his is the voice and the example of the future Iraq. And
to think that thousands of lives have already been lost to his
patron's cruel sanctions or that many more lives and livelihoods
are about to be destroyed by electronic warfare wreaked on his
country by George Bush's government. But this man is untroubled
by any of this. Devoid of either compassion or real understanding,
he prattles on for Anglo- American audiences who seem satisfied
that here at last is an Arab who exhibits the proper respect
for their power and civilisation, regardless of what role Britain
played in the imperialist partition of the Arab world or what
mischief the US dealt the Arabs through its support for Israel
and the collective Arab dictatorships.
In and of himself, Makiya is a passing
phenomenon. He is, however, a symptom of several things at once.
He represents the intellectual who serves power unquestioningly;
the greater the power, the fewer doubts he has. He is a man of
vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human
suffering. With no stable principles or values, he is typical
of the cynical anti-Arab hawks (like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,
and Donald Rumsfeld) who dot the Bush administration like flies
on a cake. British imperialism, Israel's brutal occupation policies,
or American arrogance do not detain him for a moment. Worst of
all, he is a man of pretension and superficiality, flattering
himself on his reasonableness even as he condemns his own people
to more travail and more dislocation. Woe to Iraq!
Edward Said
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