[Reader-list] Zizek and the "Fall of Baghdad"

[Rana Dasgupta]

zizek's constant embracing of ambiguity always makes him good for moments
like this.  this is a piece he wrote a few weeks ago before the war and it
may have been posted here before.  but i think it's worth looking at again.

as is his earlier essay on yugoslavia, 'against the double blackmail.'  in
which he denies the absolute separation of tyrant and democratic opinion,
shows their interdependence.  denies the "blackmail" that forces us to
choose between these two halves, wishes to unhook himself from psychological
dependence on this whole [neurotic] construct.

even the rambling, rhetorical form of his writing seems to go well with the
kinds of complexity we face in trying to understand situations like this.

R



Iraq War: Where is the true danger?


by Slavoj Zizek


We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle which Freud quotes in
order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of
mutually exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a
broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to
you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. For
Freud, such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments of course confirms per
negationem what it endeavors to deny - that I returned you a broken
kettle... Do we not encounter the same inconsistency when high US officials
try to justify the attack on Iraq?

(1) There is a link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda, so Saddam should
be punished as part of the revenge for 9/11; (2) even if there was no link
between Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, they are united in their hatred of the
US - Saddam's regime is a really bad one, a threat not only to the US, but
also to its neighbors, and we should liberate the Iraqi people; (3) the
change of regime in Iraq will create the conditions for the resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is that there are TOO MANY
reasons for the attack...

Furthermore, one is almost tempted to claim that, within the space of this
reference to the Freudian logic of dreams, the Iraqi oil supplies function
as the famous "umbilical cord" of the US justification(s) - almost tempted,
since it would perhaps be more reasonable to claim that there are also three
REAL reasons for the attack: (1) the control of the Iraqi oil reserves; (2)
the urge to brutally assert and signal the unconditional US hegemony; (3)
the "sincere" ideological belief that the US are bringing to other nations
democracy and prosperity. And it seems as if these three "real" reasons are
the "truth" of the three official reasons: (1) is the truth of the urge to
liberate Iraqis; (2) is the truth of the claim the attack on Iraq will help
to resolve the Middle East conflict; (3) is the truth of the claim that
there is a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. - And, incidentally, opponents of
the war seem to repeat the same inconsistent logic: (1) Saddam is really
bad, we also want to see him toppled, but we should give inspectors more
time, since inspectors are more efficient; (2) it is all really about the
control of oil and American hegemony - the true rogue state which terrorizes
others are the US themselves; (3) even if successful, the attack on Iraq
will give a big boost to a new wave of the anti-American terrorism; (4)
Saddam is a murderer and torturer, his regime a criminal catastrophe, but
the attack on Iraq destined to overthrow Saddam will cost too much...
The one good argument for war is the one recently evoked by Christopher
Hitchens: one should not forget that the majority of Iraqis effectively are
Saddam's victims, and they would be really glad to get rid of them. He was
such a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in WHATEVER
form may seem a much brighter prospect to them with regard to daily survival
and much lower level of fear. We are not talking here of "bringing Western
democracy to Iraq," but just of getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam.
To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but
appear deeply hypocritical - do they really care about how the Iraqi people
feel?

One can make even a more general point here: what about pro-Castro Western
Leftists who despise what Cubans themselves call "gusanos /worms/," those
who emigrated - but, with all sympathy for the Cuban revolution, what right
does a typical middle class Western Leftist have to despise a Cuban who
decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment, but also
because of poverty which goes up to simple hunger? In the same vein, I
myself remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western Leftists who proudly
threw in my face how for them, Yugoslavia still exists, and reproached me
for betraying the unique chance of maintaining Yugoslavia - to which I
always answered that I am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not
disappoint Western Leftist dreams... There are effectively few things more
worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological (if this word has any
meaning today, it should be applied here) than a tenured Western academic
Leftist arrogantly dismissing (or, even worse, "understanding" in a
patronizing way) an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs for
Western liberal democracy and some consumerist goods... However, it is all
too easy to slip from this fact to the notion that "under their skin, Iraqis
are also like us, and really want the same as we do." The old story will
repeat itself: America brings to the people new hope and democracy, but,
instead of hailing the US army, the ungrateful people do want it, they
suspect a gift in the gift, and America then reacts as a child with hurt
feelings because of the ingratitude of those it selflessly helped.

The underlying presupposition is the old one: under our skin, if we scratch
the surface, we are all Americans, that is our true desire - so all is
needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed
constraints, and they will join us in our ideological dream... No wonder
that, in February 2003, an American representative used the word "capitalist
revolution" to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their
revolution all around the world. No wonder they moved from "containing" the
enemy to a more aggressive stance. It is the US which is now, as the defunct
USSR was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. When Bush
recently said "Freedom is not America's gift to other nations, it is god's
gift to humanity," this apparent modesty nonetheless, in the best
totalitarian fashion, conceals its opposite: yes, BUT it is nonetheless the
US which perceives itself as the chosen instrument of distributing this gift
to all the nations of the world!

The idea to "repeat Japan in 1945," to bring democracy to Iraq, which will
then serve as model for the entire Arab world, enabling people to get rid of
the corrupt regimes, immediately faces an insurmountable obstacle: what
about Saudi Arabia where it is in the vital US interest that the country
does NOT turn into democracy? The result of democracy in Saudi Arabia would
have been either the repetition of Iran in 1953 (a populist regime with an
anti-imperialist twist) or of Algeria a couple of years ago, when the
"fundamentalists" WON the free elections.

There is nonetheless a grain of truth in Rumsfeld's ironic pun against the
"old Europe." The French-German united stand against the US policy apropos
Iraq should be read against the background of the French-German summit a
month ago in which Chirac and Schroeder basically proposed a kind of dual
Franco-German hegemony over the European Community. So no wonder that
anti-Americanism is at its strongest in "big" European nations, especially
France and Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One
often hears the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens
the sovereignty of the Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this
statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small
states, but the second-rate (ex-)world powers, countries like United
Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that, once fully immersed in
the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as,
say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal of "Americanization"
in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus
ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its
hegemonic role in Europe. The leveling of weight between larger and smaller
Nation-States should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of
globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European
post-Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of the wounded
Narcissism of the European "great nations." And this great-state-nationalism
is not just a feature external to the (failure of) the present opposition;
it affects the very way France and Germany articulated this opposition.
Instead of doing, even more actively, precisely what Americans are doing -
MOBILIZING the "new European" states on their own politico-military
platform, ORGANIZING the common new front -, France and Germany arrogantly
acted alone.

In the recent French resistance against the war on Iraq, there definitely is
a clear echo of the "old decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting,
by new resolutions upon resolutions - all this reminiscent of the inactivity
of the League of Nations against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call
"let the inspectors do their work" clearly IS hypocritical: they are only
allowed to do the work because there is a credible threat of military
intervention. Not to mention the French neocolonialism in Africa (from
Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French role in the Rwanda crisis and
massacres)? And about the French role in the Bosnian war? Furthermore, as it
was made clear a couple of months ago, is it not clear that France and
Germany worry about their own hegemony in Europe?

Is the war on Iraq not the moment of truth when the "official" political
distinctions are blurred? Generally, we live in a topsy-turvy world in which
Republicans freely spend money, creating record budget deficits, while
Democrats practice budget balance; in which Republicans, who thunder against
big government and preach devolution of power to states and local
communities, are in the process of creating the strongest state mechanism of
control in the entire history of humanity. And the same applies to
post-Communist countries. Symptomatic is here the case of Poland: the most
ardent supporter of the US politics in Poland is the ex-Communist president
Kwasniewski (who is even mentioned as the future secretary of NATO, after
George Robertson), while the main opposition to the participation of Poland
in the anti-Iraq coalition comes from the Rightist parties. Towards the end
of January 2003, the Polish bishops also demanded from the government that
it should add to the contract which regulates the membership of Poland in
the EU a special paragraph guaranteeing that Poland will "retain the right
to keep its fundamental values as they are formulated in its constitution" -
by which, of course, are meant the prohibition of abortion, of euthanasia
and of the same-sex marriages.

The very ex-Communist countries which are the most ardent supporters of the
US "war on terror" deeply worry that their cultural identity, their very
survival as nations, is threatened by the onslaught of cultural
"americanization" as the price for the immersion into global capitalism - we
thus witness the paradox of pro-Bushist anti-Americanism. In Slovenia, my
own country, there is a similar inconsistency: the Rightist nationalist
reproach the ruling Center-Left coalition that, although it is publicly for
joining NATO and supporting the US anti-terrorist campaign, it is secretly
sabotaging it, participating in it for opportunist reasons, not out of
conviction. At the same time, however, it is reproaching the ruling
coalition that it wants to undermine Slovene national identity by advocating
full Slovene integration into the Westernized global capitalism and thus
drowning Slovenes into contemporary Americanized pop-culture. The idea is
that the ruling coalition sustains pop culture, stupid TV amusement,
mindless consumption, etc., in order to turn Slovenes into an easily
manipulated crowd unable of serious reflection and firm ethical posture...
In short, the underlying motif is that the ruling coalition stands for the
"liberal-Communist plot" : ruthless unconstrained immersion in global
capitalism is perceived as the latest dark plot of ex-Communists enabling
them to retain their secret hold on power.

The almost tragic misunderstanding is that the nationalists, on the one
hand, unconditionally support NATO (under the US command), reproaching the
ruling coalition with secretly supporting antiglobalists and anti-American
pacifists, while, on the other hand, they worry about the fate of Slovene
identity in the process of globalization, claiming that the ruling coalition
wants to throw Slovenia into the global whirlpool, not worrying about the
Slovene national identity. Ironically, the new emerging socio-ideological
order these nationalist conservatives are bemoaning reads like the old New
Left description of the "repressive tolerance" and capitalist freedom as the
mode of appearance of unfreedom. Here, the example of Italy is crucial, with
Berlusconi as prime minister: the staunchest supporter of the US AND the
agent of the TV-idiotizing of the public opinion, turning politics into a
media show and running a large advertisement and media company.

Where, then, do we stand with reasons pro et contra? Abstract pacifism is
intellectually stupid and morally wrong - one has to stand up against a
threat. Of course the fall of Saddam would have been a relief to a large
majority of the Iraqi people. Even more, of course the militant Islam is a
horrifying anti-feminist etc. ideology. Of course there is something of a
hypocrisy in all the reasons against: the revolt should come from Iraqi
people themselves; we should not impose our values on them; war is never a
solution; etc. BUT, although all this is true, the attack is wrong - it is
WHO DOES IT that makes it wrong. The reproach is: WHO ARE YOU TO DO THIS? It
is not war or peace, it is the correct "gut feeling" that there is something
terribly wrong with THIS war, that something will irretrievably change with
it.

One of Jacques Lacan's outrageous statements is that, even if what a jealous
husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all
true, his jealousy is still pathological; along the same lines, one could
say that, even of most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they
exploit Germans, they seduce German girls...), their anti-Semitism would
still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason WHY
the Nazis NEEDED anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological
position. And the same should be said today, apropos of the US claim "Saddam
has weapons of mass destruction!" - even if this claim is true (and it
probably is, at least to some degree), it is still false with regard to the
position from which it is enunciated.

Everyone fears the catastrophic outcome of the US attack on Iraq: an
ecological catastrophe of gigantic proportions, high US casualties, a
terrorist attack in the West... In this way, we already accept the US
standpoint - and it is easy to imagine how, if the war will be over soon, in
a kind of repetition of the 1990 Gulf War, if Saddam's regime will
disintegrate fast, there will be a universal sigh of relief even among many
present critics of the US policy. One is even tempted to consider the
hypothesis that the US are on purpose fomenting this fear of an impending
catastrophe, counting on the universal relief when the catastrophe will NOT
occur... This, however, is arguably the greatest true danger. That is to
say, one should gather the courage to proclaim the opposite: perhaps, the
bad military turn for the US would be the best thing that can happen, a
sobering piece of bad news which would compel all the participants to
rethink their position.

On 9/11 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on 11/9 1989,
the Berlin Wall fell. 11/9 announced the "happy 90s," the Francis Fukuyama
dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy has in
principle won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global liberal
world community lurks round the corner, that the obstacles to this
ultra-Hollywood happy ending are just empirical and contingent, local
pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is
over; in contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the
Clintonite happy 90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging
everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on
the US-Mexican border. The prospect of a new global crisis is looming:
economic collapses, military and other catastrophes, emergency states...

And when politicians start to directly justify their decisions in ethical
terms, one can be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up such dark
threatening horizons. It is the very inflation of abstract ethical rhetorics
in George W. Bush's recent public statements (of the "Does the world have
the courage to act against the Evil or not?" type) which manifests the utter
ETHICAL misery of the US position - the function of ethical reference is
here purely mystifying, it merely serves to mask the true political stakes,
which are not difficult to discern. In their recent The War Over Iraq,
William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "The mission begins in
Baghdad, but it does not end there. /.../ We stand at the cusp of a new
historical era. /.../ This is a decisive moment. /.../ It is so clearly
about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle
East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States
intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with it:
it is effectively the future of international community which is at stake
now - the new rules which will regulate it, what the new world order will
be. What is going on now is the next logical step of the US dismissal of the
Hague court.

The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1, 2002
in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and
war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be
liable to ICC prosecution for human rights violations, including systematic
murder, torture, rape and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There
must be a recognition that we are all members of one human family. We have
to create new institutions. This is one of them. This is another step
forward in humanity's slow march toward civilization." However, while human
rights groups have hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone for
international justice since top Nazis were tried by an international
military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces stiff
opposition from the United States, Russia and China. The United States says
the court would infringe on national sovereignty and could lead to
politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working
outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even weighing legislation
authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the court will be based,
in the event prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy paradox here
is that the US thus rejected the jurisdiction of a tribunal which was
constituted with the full support (and votes) of the US themselves! Why,
then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the Hague, not be given the right to
claim that, since the US reject the legality of the international
jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal, the same argumentation should hold also
for him? And the same goes for Croatia: the US are now exerting tremendous
pressure onto the Croat government to deliver to the Hague court a couple of
its generals accused of war crimes during the struggles in Bosnia - the
reaction is, of course, how can they ask this of US when THEY do not
recognize the legitimacy of the Hague court? Or are the US citizens
effectively "more equal than others"? If one simply universalizes the
underlying principles of the Bush-doctrine, does India not have a full right
to attack Pakistan? It does directly support and harbor anti-Indian terror
in Kashmir, and it possesses (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction. Not to
mention the right of China to attack Taiwan, and so on, with unpredictable
consequences...

Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "silent revolution," in the
course of which the unwritten rules which determine the most elementary
international logic are changing? The US scold Gerhardt Schroeder, a
democratically elected leader, for maintaining a stance supported by a large
majority of the population, plus, according to the polls in the
mid-February, around 59% of the US population itself (who oppose strike
against Iraq without the UN support). In Turkey, according to opinion polls,
94% of the people are opposed to allowing the US troops' presence for the
war against Iraq - where is democracy here? Every old Leftist remembers
Marx's reply, in The Communist Manifesto, to the critics who reproached the
Communists that they aim at undermining family, property, etc.: it is the
capitalist order itself whose economic dynamics is destroying the
traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today than in
Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the population.
In the same vein, is it not that precisely those who pose today as global
defenders of democracy are effectively undermining it? In a perverse
rhetorical twist, when the pro-war leaders are confronted with the brutal
fact that their politics is out of tune with the majority of their
population, they take recourse to the commonplace wisdom that "a true leader
leads, he does not follow" - and this from leaders otherwise obsessed with
opinion polls...

The true dangers are the long-term ones. In what resides perhaps the
greatest danger of the prospect of the American occupation of Iraq? The
present regime in Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one, out of touch
with the Muslim fundamentalist populism - it is obvious that Saddam only
superficially flirts with the pan-Arab Muslim sentiment. As his past clearly
demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving for power, and shifting
alliances when it fits his purposes - first against Iran to grab their oil
fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason, bringing against himself a
pan-Arab coalition allied to the US - what Saddam is not is a fundamentalist
obsessed with the "big Satan," ready to blow the world apart just to get
him. However, what can emerge as the result of the US occupation is
precisely a truly fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly
linked to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with Muslim
presence.

One can surmise that the US are well aware that the era of Saddam and his
non-fundamentalist regime is coming to an end in Iraq, and that the attack
on Iraq is probably conceived as a much more radical preemptive strike - not
against Saddam, but against the main contender for Saddam's political
successor, a truly fundamentalist Islamic regime. Yes in this way, the
vicious cycle of the American intervention gets only more complex: the
danger is that the very American intervention will contribute to the
emergence of what America most fears, a large united anti-American Muslim
front. It is the first case of the direct American occupation of a large and
key Arab country - how could this not generate universal hatred in reaction?
One can already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming
suicide bombers, and how that will force the US government to impose a
permanent high alert emergency state... However, at this point, one cannot
resist a slightly paranoid temptation: what if the people around Bush KNOW
this, what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of the entire
operation? What if the TRUE target of the "war on terror" is the American
society itself, i.e., the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?

On March 5 2003, on "Buchanan & Press" news show on NBC, they showed on the
TV screen the photo of the recently captured Khalid Shakh Mohammed, the
"third man of al-Qaeda" - a mean face with moustaches, in an unspecified
nightgown prison-dress, half opened and with something like bruises
half-discernible (hints that he was already tortured?) -, while Pat
Buchanan's fast voice was asking: "Should this man who knows all the names
all the detailed plans for the future terrorist attacks on the US, be
tortured, so that we get all this out of him?" The horror of it was that the
photo, with its details, already suggested the answer - no wonder the
response of other commentators and viewers' calls was an overwhelming
"Yes!" - which makes one nostalgic of the good old days of the colonial war
in Algeria when the torture practiced by the French Army was a dirty
secret... Effectively, was this not a pretty close realization of what
Orwell imagined in 1984, in his vision of "hate sessions," where the
citizens are shown photos of the traitors and supposed to boo and yell at
them. And the story goes on: a day later, on another Fox TV show, a
commentator claimed that one is allowed to do with this prisoner whatever,
not only deprive him of sleep, but break his fingers, etc.etc., because he
is "a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever." THIS is the true
catastrophe: that such public statements are today possible.

We should therefore be very attentive not to fight false battles: the
debates on how bad Saddam is, even on how much the war will cost, etc., are
false debates. The focus should be on what effectively goes on in our
societies, on what kind of society is emerging HERE as the result of the
"war on terror." Instead of talking about hidden conspirative agendas, one
should shift the focus onto what is going on, onto what kind of changes are
taking place here and now. The ultimate result of the war will be a change
in OUR political order.

The true danger can be best exemplified by the actual role of the populist
Right in Europe: to introduce certain topics (the foreign threat, the
necessity to limit immigration, etc.) which were then silently taken over
not only by the conservative parties, but even by the de facto politics of
the "Socialist" governments. Today, the need to "regulate" the status of
immigrants, etc., is part of the mainstream consensus: as the story goes, le
Pen did address and exploit real problems which bother people. One is almost
tempted to say that, if there were no le Pen in France, he should have been
invented: he is a perfect person whom one loves to hate, the hatred for whom
guarantees the wide liberal "democratic pact," the pathetic identification
with democratic values of tolerance and respect for diversity - however,
after shouting "Horrible! How dark and uncivilized! Wholly unacceptable! A
threat to our basic democratic values!", the outraged liberals proceed to
act like "le Pen with a human face," to do the same thing in a more
"civilized" way, along the lines of "But the racist populists are
manipulating legitimate worries of ordinary people, so we do have to take
some measures!"...

We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a
first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by
giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign
threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very
gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its
message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background
"unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it
and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And
the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on
terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy
will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of
our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no
longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the
mainstream.