Barbarians at the gates
By Edward Said, 02/1999
For over two months now, the United States has been conducting a
low-intensity war of attrition against Iraq in the guise of sanctioned
police action authorised by the United Nations. Let me say from the outset
that there is no doubt in my mind that the Iraqi regime itself should be
condemned for providing the US with a major pretext for prosecuting this
dreadful war. Clearly, neither Saddam Hussein nor his military and political
supporters in Iraq are bearing the major brunt of the suffering imposed by
the US: it is innocent Iraqi people who are paying the price. The Baathist
government is, alas, a government of unprincipled tyranny for which no
excuse can be made: it has pillaged and invaded its neighbours, it has
squandered its country's considerable wealth and human resources, and it has
led a prosperous modern secular society into ruin.
Since the Gulf War, the Iraqi government has lied and dissembled
constantly. There can be little argument about that. The issue now is
whether what the US is doing is commensurate with the Iraqi government's
behaviour, or whether this war and sanctions far exceed in
proportionality, savagery and hypocrisy what Saddam Hussein's rule has
wrought.
To start to answer that question, it is necessary to recall that
about 15 months ago, in connection with the sanctions, Mrs Albright was
asked on television whether US policy goals (unspecified at the time) were
worth the near-genocidal number of deaths of Iraqi civilians, already
exceeding the many hundreds of thousands. "Yes," she replied confidently,
"I think it is worth it." The premise is clear: whatever the US decrees
according to its moral algebra is right, despite wholesale slaughter,
disease and irreparable human cost.
Writing in The Independent on Sunday (22 February), Robert Fisk
meticulously outlined the incremental, scarcely visible steps by which the
US has been conducting its largely unnoticed war against Iraq. He notes
that, by hitting a few targets here and there nearly every day, American
planners have counted on the media's inattention, since the bombings were
reported only intermittently and in a piece-meal fashion on the back
pages. This gave the US campaign an air of haphazard pinpricks that seemed
nowhere near as intensive or dramatic as the four-day attack of
mid-December. In fact, charges Fisk, more damage has been done since than
during the December raids, which were the central event on CNN for the
whole period. More civilians have been killed, more missile and
anti-aircraft sites have been targeted, more areas of the country have
been hit than earlier, and all this with scarcely a lifted eyebrow from
major newspapers, TV channels, and commentators. For example, on 25
January, a Basra housing complex was hit with a loss of 17 people plus 100
wounded. "In other words," Fisk said, "most of the victims were children.
A US spokesman admitted to the Basra attack, responding to the casualties
with the words: 'I want to repeat that we are not targeting civilians.'"
As I write these lines on 25 February, the New York Times reports
that US planes hit what are described as "two missile sites" a few miles
outside Baghdad; the paper goes on to say that Iraqi sources say that
there were numerous civilian casualties. Two days later, an oil-pumping
station was bombed and, although this was at first denied by the US,
casualty figures have been given by Iraq. As Dennis Halliday, the UN
director of the Oil for Food programme in Iraq, said in his letter of
resignation late last year, the casualties of Iraq are mostly children,
old people, women and the sick. The army, Baath Party officials, Saddam's
entourage are spared the worst ravages of the war as well as the
sanctions. A steady cross-border trade between Jordan, Syria, Turkey and
Iraq continues despite the sanctions, but only a relatively small number
of people can benefit from this; the vast majority of the population has
neither the means nor the mobility to get anything out of this smuggling.
In addition, a UN official based in Iraq told me yesterday, even the Oil
for Food programme is hardly working since most of Iraq's pumping capacity
has either been deliberately targeted by bombing raids or rendered useless
by the absence of spare parts, which are prohibited by the sanctions
programme on the off chance that they might benefit Iraq's military
programme. (On the same basis, tires for ambulances are prohibited, as are
pencils for schools). Slowly, therefore, Iraq's infrastructure is being
destroyed. Sewage, electrical power, travel, communications, food
distribution, water, medicine, education -- access to all these is
impaired to such a degree that most people now suffer the ravages of
isolation, disease, darkness, and desperation without hope or respite.
Anyone wishing to read about the horrendous extent of what has been done
to Iraq is advised immediately to read the 1998 edition of Geoff Simons's
book The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice, a copious
repository of facts, argument and condemnation (published by Macmillan's).
The stated US goal, now openly declared, is to replace Saddam. As
with most American strategic objectives this has a nice theoretical sound
to it but, given the realities of the disorganised and discredited exile
opposition, is hardly realisable. Even if it were, it would mean so vast
and complete a realignment of internal Iraqi society as to fragment the
country into incoherence and catastrophe. The question therefore is a
two-part one: one, does the US have the right to do all this, and two, is
such a strategy itself worth it in lives lost, ruined, and otherwise
distorted beyond recognition?
If the answer is no (as I believe it should be), we should then go
on to ask why such a ruinous policy is being prosecuted for such meagre,
not to say frighteningly inhumane results. A number of reasons propose
themselves. First of all, there is a long, relatively uninterrupted
tradition in American history of exterminating without mercy peoples who
are considered to be savages and demons. This starts with the native
American peoples, 90 per cent of whom were massacred during the first two
centuries of this country's life, all in the name of progress, doing God's
work and eradicating barbarians.
This history of reducing whole peoples, countries and even
continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust deserves to be better
known by non-Americans, who believe despite all the evidence that the US
is a country dedicated to enlightened Wilsonian ideals of liberty and
democracy. The facts tell a grisly story next to which the colonial
experiences of Britain, France, Russia, Spain and Portugal can barely hold
their own. An excellent source on the sad fate of local peoples is David
Stannard's book American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New
World (l992), but this can be supplemented by Howard Zinn's important
volume A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present (l980).
The official story of America's dealings with lesser peoples is one
of altruism, enlightenment and progressive policies of assistance and
rescue. The real story is considerably darker, as a glance at the ruin
brought on by US intervention throughout Latin America, the Caribbean,
Asia (especially the Philippines, Japan, Indochina, and Indonesia),
Africa, and the Middle East will instantly reveal. There is an attitude of
murderous righteousness in most cases, roughly the same whether it is the
New England Puritans killing Indians or people like Henry Kissinger
ordering the bombing of Laos and Cambodia.
A second factor is a combination of organised ignorance and
official lying. Here the media plays a central role. To most Americans,
Iraq is basically a non-existent place populated by a devil called Saddam
Hussein, and that is all. Certainly the average person on the street is
given no indication by CNN of the 6,000 years of civilisation there, or
that modern Iraq was arguably the most modern, secular and advanced of
Arab countries before its systematic destruction. As for Iraqis as a
people -- they can hardly be said to have any identity at all since
neither the country's poets and artists, nor its doctors, nor its
architects, nor its productive and courageous citizens are given any
coverage at all.
In effect then, as the US is destroying the country the media abets
the policy by presenting no evidence that there is such a thing as an
Iraqi people with a history, society and life that is undergoing a
sadistic dismantling and dehumanisation. No evidence at all. And so the
bombing continues with scarcely a peep of protest or awareness. A third
factor is that the people responsible for this policy, whether one starts
with Bill Clinton or Madeleine Albright, and then moves down through Sandy
Berger, the CIA, the Defence Department and all the others, are basically
uninformed and ignorant about what they are doing but so powerful and
isolated as to be impervious to criticism. Take as another case in point
the bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan last summer. Since that time,
isolated reports have shown the whole enterprise to have been politically
motivated as a way of trying to save Clinton's skin during his
investigation and impeachment. Seymour Hersh, the celebrated investigative
reporter who looked into the Sudan episode, wrote a scathing account of
how there was no significant evidence that the pharmaceutical factory
targeted by the CIA had anything to do with chemical warfare. I talked to
Hersh last week and he told me how amazed he was at the CIA's folly and
ignorance about Iraq, its clumsy attempts to set up coups (several of them
not only failures but unreported by the media) and generally encourage the
lamentable exile groups, all of it based on poor information and worse
analysis. Unluckily, Arabs as a whole have such an unflattering image in
this country, with no powerful lobby, and no tradition of public challenge
to authority that the current policy against the Iraqi people can continue
this way more or less forever.
The question that troubles me is how long our people will continue
to tolerate so inhumane and contemptuous a US policy. This tolerance is
widely interpreted in the US media as "total support for what we are doing
in Iraq from our Arab allies". A few days ago a relatively small number of
unarmed Lebanese students came down to Arnoun (recently occupied by the
Israeli army) in south Lebanon and with their bare hands liberated the
town from Israeli soldiers. Israel and the United States have similar
policies towards the Arabs, which is why of course they support and give
comfort to each other, but surely the lesson of Arnoun is that only
courageous and stubborn resistance will get these oppressors to lay off
their bullying. That certainly has been one of the lessons of the Vietnam
War, of Cuba's refusal to be cowed by its gigantic neighbour to the north,
and of the Arnoun episode.
As to why our rulers think that only a polite deference (seen as
tacit acceptance for an American genocide against the Iraqi people) will
get us America's respect and consideration is a mystery to me. At any
rate, an awakened Arab citizenry needs to apply its weight and influence
where both count. We need to organise against the campaign to "scourge"
Iraq not only because it is morally wrong -- after all, the US cynically
exploits the UN for this purpose, without paying its dues or observing any
other UN resolutions, which it systematically flouts in Israel's case --
but because it is very likely that another Arab or Muslim country will be
next.
This continuing series of US aggressions, in my opinion, is the
clash of civilisations, or rather the clash of untrammeled barbarism with
civilisation, with a vengeance.
