A monument to hypocrisy

A monument to hypocrisy

Edward Said

Al-Ahram Weekly
February 13-19,2003


Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in protest, now and 
again and again, writes Edward Said

It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this 
country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf 
through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every 
evening, just to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning, 
but patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, 
designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN 
into going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in moral 
hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in 
Munich this past weekend went one step further than the bumbling Powell 
in unctuous sermonising and bullying derision. For the moment, I shall 
discount George Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, 
and political managers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl 
Rove: they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the 
repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I 
believe is also an Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has said, in direct 
contact with God, or if not God, then at least Providence. Perhaps only 
Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state 
and defence seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women 
and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over 
their words and activities.

First, a few preliminaries. The US has clearly decided on war: there 
seem to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take 
place or not (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states 
who, as usual, seem to dither and be paralysed at the same time, but by 
France, Russia and Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless to 
have transported 200,000 troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, 
leaving aside smaller deployments in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean 
only one thing.

Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, 
are chicken hawks, that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any 
fighting themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that 
entirely civilian group were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam 
War, yet each of them got a deferment based on privilege, and therefore 
never fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their 
belligerence is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, 
anti-democratic in the extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks 
in a war with Iraq has nothing to do with actual military 
considerations. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its 
deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to 
neighbours like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could 
easily handle it militarily) or certainly to the US. Any argument to 
the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. 
With a few outdated Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and 
biological material, most of it supplied by the US in earlier days (as 
Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was 
sold to Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, 
containable, though at unconscionable cost to the long-suffering 
civilian population. For this terrible state of affairs I think it is 
absolutely true to say that there has been collusion between the Iraqi 
regime and the Western enforcers of the sanctions.

Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change -- a process 
already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs of this country -- there is 
simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a 
dubious caliber actually go on blathering about bringing democracy, 
modernisation, and liberalisation to the Middle East? God knows that 
the area needs it, as so many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and 
ordinary people have said over and over. But who appointed these 
characters as agents of progress anyway? And what entitles them to 
pontificate in so shameless a way when there are already so many 
injustices and abuses in their own country to be remedied? It's 
particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is 
imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice, 
should have been an election adviser to Netanyahu's extreme right- wing 
government during the period 1996-9, in which he counseled the renegade 
Israeli to scrap any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and 
Gaza, and try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man 
now talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East, and does so 
without provoking the slightest objection from any of the media pundits 
who politely (abjectly) quiz him on national television.

Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its 
plagiarised and manufactured evidence, its confected audio-tapes and 
its doctored pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's 
regime has violated numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can 
be no arguing with that and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so 
monumentally hypocritical about the official US position is that 
literally everything Powell has accused the Ba'athists of has been the 
stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time 
more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal 
detention, assassination, assaults against civilians with missiles, 
helicopters and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation 
of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, 
mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatilla to mention only the 
most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded civilian 
movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians as human shields, 
humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale, 
destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal 
settlement, economic pauperisation, attacks on hospitals, medical 
workers and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most 
outrageous abuses: all these, it should be noted with emphasis, have 
been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United 
States which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such 
practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has 
given the country upwards of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale 
that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the US government 
on its own citizens.

This is an unconscionable record to hold against the US, and Mr Powell 
as its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of US 
foreign policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of 
this country, and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and 
the promotion of freedom -- the proclaimed central plank in the US's 
foreign policy since at least 1976 -- is applied uniformly, without 
exception or condition. How he and his bosses and co- workers can stand 
up before the world and righteously sermonise against Iraq while at the 
same time completely ignoring the ongoing American partnership in human 
rights abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet no one, in all 
the justified critiques of the US position that have appeared since 
Powell made his great UN speech, has focused on this point, not even 
the ever-so- upright French and Germans. The Palestinian territories 
today are witnessing the onset of a mass famine; there is a health 
crisis of catastrophic proportions; there is a civilian death toll that 
totals at least a dozen to 20 people a week; the economy has collapsed; 
hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, 
or move about as curfews and at least 300 barricades impede their daily 
lives; houses are blown up or bulldozed on a mass basis (60 yesterday).
 
And all of it with US equipment, US political support, US finances.
 
Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard, is a 
man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinians' lives that 
have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has 
the gall to say that he acts in God's name, and that he (and his 
administration) act to serve "a just and faithful God". And, more 
astounding yet, he lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN 
resolutions even as he supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at 
least 64 of them on a daily basis for more than half a century.

But so craven and so ineffective are the Arab regimes today that they 
don't dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need US 
economic aid. Many of them fear their own people and need US support to 
prop up their regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the 
same crimes against humanity. So they say nothing, and just hope and 
pray that the war will pass, while in the end keeping them in power as 
they are.

But it is also a great and noble fact that for the first time since 
World War Two there are mass protests against the war taking place 
before rather than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and 
should become the central political fact of the new, globalised era 
into which our world has been thrust by the US and its super-power 
status. What this demonstrates is that despite the awesome power 
wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and his American 
antagonists, despite the complicity of a mass media that has (willingly 
or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, despite the indifference and 
ignorance of a great many people, mass action and mass protest on the 
basis of human community and human sustainability are still formidable 
tools of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. 
But that they have at least tampered with the plans of the Washington 
chicken hawks and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of 
religious monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who 
believe in wars of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time.
 
Wherever I go to lecture or speak out against these injustices I 
haven't found anyone in support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link 
our opposition to US action in Iraq to our support for human rights in 
Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan and everywhere in the Arab world -- 
and also ask others to force the same linkage on everyone, Arab, 
American, African, European, Australian and Asian. These are world 
issues, human issues, not simply strategic matters for the United 
States or the other major powers.

We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White 
House has openly announced will include three to five hundred cruise 
missiles a day (800 of them during the first 48 hours of the war) 
raining down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce 
"Shock and Awe", or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its 
boastful planner a certain Mr (or is it Dr?) Harlan Ullman has said, a 
Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991 
Gulf War after 41 days of bombing Iraq this scale of human devastation 
was not even approached. And the US has 6000 "smart" missiles ready to 
do the job. What sort of God would want this to be a formulated and 
announced policy for His people? And what sort of God would claim that 
this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not only of 
Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?

These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if 
anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth it 
would be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war 
criminals according to the Nuremberg Laws that the US itself was 
crucial in formulating. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul 
Mofaz welcome the war and praise George Bush. Who knows what more evil 
will be done in the name of Good? Every one of us must raise our 
voices, and march in protest, now and again and again. We need creative 
thinking and bold action to stave off the nightmares planned by a 
docile, professionalised staff in places like Washington and Tel Aviv 
and Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is what they call "greater 
security" then words have no meaning at all in the ordinary sense. That 
Bush and Sharon have contempt for the non-white people of this world is 
clear. The question is, how long can they keep getting away with it?