[A-List] Edward Said Article

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I met Fouad Ajami in a small conference of 8 in Nigeria on World Order
in 1976 when he was still at Princton and a pro-palestinian academic. He
has become a neocon most of whom are immigrants from the left.

London Review of Books | Vol. 25 No. 8 dated 17 April 2003 | Edward Said



The Academy of Lagado


Edward Said
Full of contradictions, flat-out lies and groundless affirmations, the
torrent of reporting and commentary on the 'coalition' war against Iraq
has obscured the negligence of the military and policy experts who
planned it and now justify it. For the past two weeks, I have been
travelling in Egypt and Lebanon trying to keep up with the stream of
information and misinformation coming out of Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and
Jordan, much of it misleadingly upbeat, but some of it horrifyingly
dramatic in its import as well as its immediacy. The Arab satellite
channels, al-Jazeera being by now the most notorious and efficient, have
given a quite different view of the war from the standard stuff served
up by American reporters with their mass uprisings in Basra, their
multiple 'falls' of Umm Qasr and al-Faw, their talk of Iraqis being
killed for not fighting, and their grimy pictures of themselves, as lost
as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with. Al-Jazeera
has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and Nasiriya, one of them
the irrepressible Tasir Alouni, fluent veteran of the Afghanistan war,
and they have presented a much more detailed, more realistic account of
what has befallen Baghdad and Basra, as well as showing the resistance
and anger of the Iraqi population, dismissed by Western propaganda as a
sullen bunch waiting to throw flowers at Clint Eastwood lookalikes.

Let's get straight to what is so unwise about this war, leaving aside
for the moment its illegality and international unpopularity. In the
first place, no one has satisfactorily proved that Iraq possesses
weapons of mass destruction that furnish an imminent threat to the
United States. Iraq is a hugely weakened and ineffective Third World
state ruled by a hated despotic regime: there is no disagreement about
that anywhere, least of all in the Arab and Islamic world. But that
after 12 years of sanctions it is a threat of any kind to any other
state is a laughable notion, and not a single journalist of the overpaid
legions who swarm around the Pentagon, State Department and White House
has ever bothered to investigate it.

Iraq might once have been a potential challenge to Israel. It was the
one Arab country with the human and natural resources, as well as the
infrastructure, to take on Israel's arrogant brutality. That is why
Begin bombed Iraq pre-emptively in 1981, supplying a model for the US in
its own pre-emptive war. How regrettable that the media have failed to
elucidate the Likud's slow takeover of US military and political
thinking about the Arab world. So fearful has everyone been of the
charge of anti-semitism that the stranglehold of the neo-conservative
cum Christian Right cum Pentagon civilian hawks on American policy is
now a reality which forces the entire country into an attitude of
undifferentiated bellicosity.

The idea that Iraq's population would have welcomed American forces
entering the country after a terrifying aerial bombardment was always
utterly implausible. That this became one of the lynchpins of US policy
is evidence of the rubbish fed to the Administration by the Iraqi
opposition (many of whose members were out of touch with their country
as well as keen on promoting their postwar careers by persuading the
Americans of how easy an invasion would be) and by the two accredited
Middle East experts identified long ago as having the most influence
over American Middle East policy, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami.

Now in his late eighties, Lewis came to the US from the UK some thirty
years ago to teach at Princeton. His fervent anti-Communism and
disapproval of everything about contemporary Arabs and Islam pushed him
to the forefront of the pro-Israel contingents during the last years of
the 20th century. An old-fashioned Orientalist who seems to have little
feeling for any country in the region other than Turkey, he was quickly
bypassed by the advances in the social sciences and humanities that
formed a new generation of scholars who treated Arabs and Muslims as
living subjects rather than benighted natives. For Lewis, vast
generalisations about Islam and about the backwardness of 'the Arabs'
were viable routes to the truth. Common sense about human experience was
out: resounding pronouncements about the clash of civilisations were in
(Samuel Huntington derived his lucrative concept from one of Lewis's
essays about the 'return of Islam'). A generalist and an ideologue,
Lewis found a new audience within the American Zionist lobby to whom, in
journals such as Commentary and later the New York Review of Books, he
addressed his tendentious pontifications.

What made Lewis's work so damaging was its appeal - in the absence of
any counter-argument - to American policy-makers. That, together with
the superciliousness of his manner, turned him into an 'authority' even
though he hadn't entered, much less lived in, the Arab world in decades.
His last book, What Went Wrong?, became a post-11 September bestseller
and, I am told, required reading for the US military, despite its
unsupported and often factually incorrect statements about the history
of the Arabs over the past five hundred years. Reading the book, you get
the idea that they are a useless bunch of primitives, easier to attack
and destroy than ever before.

Lewis formulated the thesis that there were three overlapping circles in
the Middle East: countries with pro-American people and governments
(Jordan, Egypt and Morocco), countries with pro-American people and
anti-American governments (Iraq and Iran), and countries with
anti-American governments and people (Syria and Libya). This thinking
gradually made its way into Pentagon planning, at the same time as Lewis
repeated his simplistic formulae on television and in articles for the
right-wing press. Arabs, it was now entirely reasonable to believe,
wouldn't fight; indeed, they would welcome us - they were entirely
vulnerable to whatever power America could bring to bear on them.

Fouad Ajami is a Lebanese Shia educated in the US who made his name as a
pro-Palestinian commentator. But by the mid-1980s, he was teaching at
Johns Hopkins; he'd become a fervent anti-Arab ideologue and had been
taken up by the right-wing Zionist lobby (he now works for Martin Peretz
and Mort Zuckerman) and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is fond of
describing himself as a non-fiction Naipaul and quotes Conrad while
sounding as hokey as Khalil Gibran. He also has a penchant for catchy
one-liners, ideally suited to television. The author of two or three
books, he has become influential as a 'native informant' - the Arab
'expert' is a rare species on American networks. Ten years ago, he
started deploying 'we' as an imperial collectivity which, along with
Israel, never does anything wrong. Arabs are to blame for everything and
therefore deserve 'our' contempt and hostility.

Ajami has always had it in for Iraq. He was an early advocate of the
1991 war and has, I think, deliberately misled the American strategic
mind into believing that 'our' power can set things straight. Dick
Cheney quoted him in a major speech last August as saying that Iraqis
would welcome 'us' as liberators in 'the streets of Basra' - which still
fights on as I write. Like Lewis, Ajami hasn't been a resident of the
Arab world for years, although he is rumoured to be close to the Saudis,
of whom he has recently spoken as models for the Arab world's future
governance.

One can only wince at the way weak-minded policy hacks in the Pentagon
and White House have spun out the 'ideas' of Lewis and Ajami into the
scenario for a quick romp in a friendly Iraq. The State Department,
after a long campaign against its so-called 'Arabists', is purged of any
countervailing views, and Colin Powell is little more than a dutiful
servant of power. So, because of its potential to make trouble in
Israel, Saddam's Iraq was targeted for military and political
termination - never mind its history, its complicated society, its
internal dynamics and contradictions. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle
said exactly that in 1996, when they were acting as consultants to
Benjamin Netanyahu's election campaign. That the Iraqis would be willing
to accept more punishment from America, in addition to Saddam's tyranny,
on the off chance that they would be 'liberated', was taken for granted.
Look at the war against Afghanistan, which also featured bombing and
peanut butter sandwiches. Yes, Karzai is now in power but it's power of
a very iffy kind, and the Taliban, the Pakistani secret services and the
poppy fields are all back, as are the warlords. Hardly a brilliant
blueprint to follow in Iraq.

As for the expatriate Iraqi opposition, it has always been a motley
bunch. Its leader Ahmad Chalabi may be a brilliant man but he has been
found guilty of fraud in Jordan and has no real constituency beyond Paul
Wolfowitz's Pentagon office. He and his helpers - Kanan Makiya, for
example, the man who said that news of the merciless high-altitude US
bombing of his native land was 'music to my ears' - plus a few
ex-Baathists, Shiite clerics and others have also sold the US
Administration a bill of goods about quick wars, deserting soldiers,
cheering crowds, similarly unsupported by evidence or lived experience.
One can't fault these people for wanting to rid the world of Saddam
Hussein: we'd all be better off without him. The problem has been the
falsifying of reality and the creation of scenarios for unchecked
American policy planners to foist on a fundamentalist President and a
largely misinformed public. In all this, Iraq might as well have been
the moon and the Pentagon and White House Swift's Academy of Lagado.

Another thought-stopping premise underlying the campaign in Iraq is that
the map of the Middle East can be redrawn in such a way as to set in
motion a 'domino effect' that will introduce Israel-friendly democracies
all over the territory. According to this model, the Iraqi people are a
blank sheet on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert
Kagan and other deep thinkers of the Far Right. As I said in an earlier
article for the LRB (17 October 2002), such ideas were first tried out
by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then more
recently in Palestine, where, in terms of security, peace and subaltern
compliance, there's been nothing to show for it. Never mind:
well-trained US special forces have practised and perfected the storming
of civilian homes alongside Israeli soldiers in Jenin. It is hard to
believe, as this ill-conceived war advances, that things will be very
different in Iraq. On the other hand, with countries like Syria and Iran
involved, their shaky regimes shaken even further, and general Arab
outrage inflamed to boiling point, one cannot imagine that victory in
Iraq will resemble any of the simple-minded myths posited by Bush and
his entourage.

What is truly puzzling is that the prevailing American ideology is still
underpinned by the view that US power is basically benign and
altruistic. This surely accounts for the outrage expressed by US pundits
and officials that Iraqis should have had the gall to resist at all, or
that, when captured, US soldiers were exhibited on Iraqi TV. Apparently
this is much worse than showing rows of Iraqi prisoners made to kneel or
lie spread-eagled in the sand. Breaches of the Geneva Conventions are
invoked not for Camp X-Ray but for Saddam, and when his forces hide
inside cities, that is cheating, while high-altitude bombing is playing
fair.

This is the most reckless war in modern times. It is all about imperial
arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or
experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in
its violence and the cruelty of its technology. What winning, or for
that matter losing, such a war will ultimately entail is unthinkable.
But pity the Iraqi civilians who must still suffer a great deal more
before they are finally 'liberated'.

3 April

Edward Said's Reflections on Exile, a collection of essays, many of them
written for this paper, is published by Granta. A memoir, Out of Place,
came out in 1999.