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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 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 ?
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