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The Bush administration's relentless unilateral march towards war is
profoundly disturbing for many reasons, but so far as American
citizens are concerned the whole grotesque show is a tremendous
failure in democracy. An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has
been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all of them unelected
and therefore unresponsive to public pressure, and simply turned on
its head.
It is no exaggeration to say that this war is the most unpopular in
modern history. Before the war has begun there have been more people
protesting it in this country alone than was the case at the height
of the anti- Vietnam war demonstrations during the 60s and 70s. Note
also that those rallies took place after the war had been going on
for several years: this one has yet to begin, even though a large
number of overtly aggressive and belligerent steps have already been
taken by the US and its loyal puppy, the UK government of the
increasingly ridiculous Tony Blair.
I have been criticised recently for my anti-war position by
illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defence of
Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I
need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba'athi Iraq during the
only visit I made to Kuwait in 1985, when in an open conversation
with the then Minister of Education Hassan Al-Ibrahim I accused him
and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their
financial support of Saddam Hussein?
I was told then that Kuwait was proud to have committed billions of
dollars to Saddam's war against "the Persians", as they were then
contemptuously called, and that it was a more important struggle
than someone like me could comprehend. I remember clearly warning
those Kuwaiti acolytes of Saddam Hussein about him and his ill will
against Kuwait, but to no avail.
I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime since it came to
power in the 70s: I never visited the place, never was fooled by its
claims to secularism and modernisation (even when many of my
contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq as the main gun
in the Arab arsenal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I thought),
never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and fascist
behaviour.
And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of
certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools
of US imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without
democracy (about which more later), and am therefore unable to
appreciate their nobility of soul.
Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week after
extolling President Bush's commitment to democracy Professor Makiya
is now denouncing the US and its plans for a post-Saddam military-
Ba'athi government in Iraq. When individuals get in the habit of
switching the gods whom they worship politically there's no end to
the number of changes they make before they finally come to rest in
utter disgrace and well deserved oblivion.
But to return to the US and its current actions. In all my
encounters and travels I have yet to meet a person who is for the
war. Even worse, most Americans now feel that this mobilisation has
already gone too far to stop, and that we are on the verge of a
disaster for the country. Consider first of all that the Democratic
Party, with few exceptions, has simply gone over to the president's
side in a gutless display of false patriotism.
Wherever you look in the Congress there are the tell-tale signs
either of the Zionist lobby, the right-wing Christians, or the
military-industrial complex, three inordinately influential minority
groups who share hostility to the Arab world, unbridled support for
extremist Zionism, and an insensate conviction that they are on the
side of the angels.
Every one of the 500 congressional districts in this country has a
defence industry in it, so that war has been turned into a matter of
jobs, not of security.
But, one might well ask, how does running an unbelievably expensive
war remedy, for instance, economic recession, the almost certain
bankruptcy of the social security system, a mounting national debt,
and a massive failure in public education? Demonstrations are looked
at simply as a kind of degraded mob action, while the most
hypocritical lies pass for absolute truth, without criticism and
without objection.
The media has simply become a branch of the war effort. What has
entirely disappeared from television is anything remotely resembling
a consistently dissenting voice. Every major channel now employs
retired generals, former CIA agents, terrorism experts and known
neoconservatives as "consultants" who speak a revolting jargon
designed to sound authoritative but in effect supporting everything
done by the US, from the UN to the sands of Arabia.
Only one major daily newspaper (in Baltimore) has published anything
about US eavesdropping, telephone tapping and message interception
of the six small countries that are members of the Security Council
and whose votes are undecided. There are no antiwar voices to read
or hear in any of the major medias of this country, no Arabs or
Muslims (who have been consigned en masse to the ranks of the
fanatics and terrorists of this world), no critics of Israel, not on
Public Broadcasting, not in The New York Times, the New Yorker, US
News and World Report, CNN and the rest.
When these organisations mention Iraq's flouting of 17 UN
resolutions as a pretext for war, the 64 resolutions flouted by
Israel (with US support) are never mentioned. Nor is the enormous
human suffering of the Iraqi people during the past 12 years
mentioned. Whatever the dreaded Saddam has done Israel and Sharon
have also done with American support, yet no one says anything about
the latter while fulminating about the former. This makes a total
mockery of taunts by Bush and others that the UN should abide by its
own resolutions.
The American people have thus been deliberately lied to, their
interests cynically misrepresented and misreported, the real aims
and intentions of this private war of Bush the son and his junta
concealed with complete arrogance. Never mind that Wolfowitz, Feith,
and Perle, all of them unelected officials who work for unelected
Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, have for some time openly advocated
Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the cessation of
the Oslo process, have called for war against Iraq (and later Iran),
and the building of more illegal Israeli settlements in their
capacity (during Netanyahu's successful campaign for prime minister
in 1996) as private consultants to him, and that that has become US
policy now.
Never mind that Israel's iniquitous policies against Palestinians,
which are reported only at the ends of articles (when they are
reported at all) as so many miscellaneous civilian deaths, are never
compared with Saddam's crimes, which they match or in some cases
exceed, all of them, in the final analysis, paid for by the US
taxpayer without consultation or approval. Over 40,000 Palestinians
have been wounded seriously in the last two years, and about 2,500
killed wantonly by Israeli soldiers who are instructed to humiliate
and punish an entire people during what has become the longest
military occupation in modern history.
Never mind that not a single critical Arab or Muslim voice has been
seen or heard on the major American media, liberal, moderate, or
reactionary, with any regularity at all since the preparations for
war have gone into their final phase. Consider also that none of the
major planners of this war, certainly not the so-called experts like
Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, neither of whom has so much as lived
in or come near the Arab world in decades, nor the military and
political people like Powell, Rice, Cheney, or the great god Bush
himself, know anything about the Muslim or Arab worlds beyond what
they see through Israeli or oil company or military lenses, and
therefore have no idea what a war of this magnitude against Iraq
will produce for the people actually living there.
And consider too the sheer, unadorned hubris of men like Wolfowitz
and his assistants. Asked to testify to a largely somnolent Congress
about the war's consequences and costs they are allowed to escape
without giving any concrete answers, which effectively dismisses the
evidence of the army chief of staff who has spoken of a military
occupation force of 400,000 troops for 10 years at a cost of almost
a trillion dollars.
Democracy traduced and betrayed, democracy celebrated but in fact
humiliated and trampled on by a tiny group of men who have simply
taken charge of this republic as if it were nothing more than, what,
an Arab country? It is right to ask who is in charge since clearly
the people of the United States are not properly represented by the
war this administration is about to loose on a world already
beleaguered by too much misery and poverty to endure more.
And Americans have been badly served by a media controlled
essentially by a tiny group of men who edit out anything that might
cause the government the slightest concern or worry. As for the
demagogues and servile intellectuals who talk about war from the
privacy of their fantasy worlds, who gave them the right to connive
in the immiseration of millions of people whose major crime seems to
be that they are Muslims and Arabs? What American, except for this
small unrepresentative group, is seriously interested in increasing
the world's already ample stores of anti-Americanism? Hardly any I
would suppose.
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