[Reader-list] Said on Iraq

[Monica Narula]

Edward Said: The US is preparing to attack the Arab world, while the 
Arabs whimper in submission
Saturday January 25, 2003
The Guardian

One opens the New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent 
article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the 
United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers 
and cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents 
of officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. An enormous, 
deliberately intimidating force is being built up by America 
overseas, while inside the country, economic and social bad news 
multiply with a joint relentlessness.

The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering, even as it grinds 
down the vast majority of citizens. None the less, George Bush 
proposes another large tax cut for the 1% of the population that is 
comparatively rich. The public education system is in crisis and 
health insurance for 50 million Americans simply does not exist. 
Israel asks for $15bn in additional loan guarantees and military aid. 
And the unemployment rates in the US mount inexorably, as more jobs 
are lost every day.

Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue 
without either public approval or, at least until very recently, 
dramatically noticeable disapproval. A generalised indifference among 
the majority of the population (which may conceal great overall fear, 
ignorance and apprehension) has greeted the administration's 
warmongering and its strangely ineffective response to the challenge 
forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of Iraq, with no 
weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a war; in the 
case of North Korea, it offers economic and energy aid. What a 
humiliating difference between contempt for the Arabs and respect for 
North Korea, an equally grim and cruel dictatorship.

In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar. 
For almost a year American politicians, regional experts, 
administration officials and journalists have repeated the charges 
that have become standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are 
concerned. Most of this predates September 11. To today's practically 
unanimous chorus has been added the authority of the UN human 
development report on the Arab world, which certified that Arabs 
dramatically lag behind the rest of the world in democracy, knowledge 
and women's rights.

Everyone says (with some justification, of course) that Islam needs 
reform and that the Arab educational system is a disaster - in 
effect, a school for religious fanatics and suicide bombers funded 
not just by crazy imams and their wealthy followers (such as Osama 
bin Laden) but also by governments who are the supposed allies of the 
US.

The only "good" Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying 
modern Arab culture and society without reservation. I recall the 
lifeless cadences of their sentences for, with nothing positive to 
say about themselves or their people and language, they simply 
regurgitate the tired American formulas already flooding the airwaves 
and pages of print. We lack democracy, they say, we haven't 
challenged Islam enough, we need to do more about driving away the 
spectre of Arab nationalism and the credo of Arab unity. That is all 
discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what we and our American 
instructors say about the Arabs and Islam - vague, recycled 
Orientalist clichŽs repeated by tireless mediocrities such as Bernard 
Lewis - are true, they insist. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic 
enough. "We" need to join modernity - modernity in effect being 
western, globalised, free marketed, democratic, whatever those words 
might be taken to mean. There would be an essay to be written about 
the prose style of licensed academics like Fuad Ajami, Fawwaz Gerges, 
Kanan Makiya, Shibli Talhami, Mamoon Fandy, whose very language reeks 
of subservience, inauthenticity and the hopelessly stilted mimicry 
that has been thrust upon them.

The clash of civilisations that George Bush and his minions are 
trying to fabricate as a cover for a pre-emptive oil and hegemony war 
against Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic 
nation-building, regime change and forcible modernisation ˆ 
l'AmŽricaine. Never mind the bombs and the ravages of the sanctions, 
which are unmentioned. This will be a purifying war whose goal is to 
throw out Saddam and his men and replace them with a redrawn map of 
the whole region. New Sykes Picot. New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 
points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi 
dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and perhaps forget 
entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps.

Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying situation in Palestine 
worsens all the time. There seems no force capable of stopping Ariel 
Sharon and his defence minister Shaul Mofaz, who bellow their 
defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we ban, we break, 
we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an entire people 
continues.

As I write these lines, I am sent an announcement that the village of 
Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area of the West Bank is about to be wiped 
out by 60-tonne American-made Israeli bulldozers: 250 Palestinians 
will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunums of agricultural land, a mosque 
and an elementary school for 132 children. The UN stands by, looking 
on as its resolutions are flouted on an hourly basis. Alas, George 
Bush identifies with Sharon, not with the 16-year-old Palestinian kid 
who is used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking 
and, presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned for 10 years, Arafat 
seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His faithful 
lieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press, 
suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or less. 
Remarkably, though, the great mass of this heroic people seems 
willing to go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going 
hungry, dying day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence 
in the justice of their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as 
their leaders have done. What could be more discouraging for the 
average Gazan who goes on resisting Israeli occupation than to see 
his or her leaders kneel as supplicants before the Americans?

In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the 
utter passivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The 
American government and its servants issue statement after statement 
of purpose, they move troops and material, they transport tanks and 
destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively can barely 
muster a bland refusal. At most they say no, you cannot use military 
bases in our territory, only to reverse themselves a few days later.

Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness? The 
largest power in history is about to launch a war against a sovereign 
Arab country now ruled by a dreadful regime, the clear purpose of 
which is not only to destroy the Ba'ath regime but to redesign the 
entire region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its plans are to 
redraw the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other 
regimes and borders in the process. No one can be shielded from the 
cataclysm if and when it comes. And yet, there is only long silence 
followed by a few vague bleats of polite demurral in response. 
Millions of people will be affected, yet America contemptuously plans 
for their future without consulting them. Do we deserve such racist 
derision?

This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a 
region of almost 300 million Arabs wait passively for the blows to 
fall without attempting a collective roar of resistance? Has the Arab 
will completely dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed 
usually has some last words to pronounce. Why is there now no last 
testimonial to an era of history, to a civilisation about to be 
crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that, despite its 
drawbacks and weaknesses, nevertheless goes on functioning?

Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men and women 
marry and work and have children, they play and laugh and eat, they 
are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and 
companionship, friendship and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed 
and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the 
business of living despite everything. This is the reality that both 
the Arab leaders and the US ignore when they fling empty gestures at 
the so-called "Arab street" invented by banal Orientalists.

Who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a 
people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics 
and submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The 
Arab governments - no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom 
- sit back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines 
up, threatens and ships out more soldiers and F-16s to deliver the 
punch. The silence is deafening.

Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of 
prisons and torture chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families 
destroyed, endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For 
what?

This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it's a matter 
of what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate 
seriousness. Technology, modernisation and certainly globalisation 
are not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in 
our tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that 
treats of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and 
anger, of society and history. This is there, but no voice, no 
individual with great vision and moral authority seems able now to 
tap into that and bring it to attention.

We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our political, moral and 
religious leaders can only just denounce a little bit while, behind 
whispers and winks and closed doors, they make plans somehow to ride 
out the storm. They think of survival, and perhaps of heaven. But who 
is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land, the water, the 
air and the lives dependent on each other for existence? No one seems 
to be in charge.

There is a wonderful expression that very precisely and ironically 
catches our unacceptable helplessness, our passivity and inability to 
help ourselves now when our strength is most needed. The expression 
is: will the last person to leave please turn out the lights? We are 
that close to a kind of upheaval that will leave very little standing 
and perilously little left even to record, except for the last 
injunction that begs for extinction.

Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and formulate a 
genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our world? 
This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although God 
knows that we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a 
return to Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our 
existence and let us live in peace, another cringing, crawling, 
inaudible plea for mercy? Will no one come out into the light of day 
to express a vision for our future that isn't based on a script 
written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, those two symbols of 
vacant power and overweening arrogance? I hope someone is listening.

á Edward Said is professor of English and comparative literature at 
Columbia University, New York. His books include Orientalism and 
Covering Islam. His latest work, Parallels and Paradoxes, cowritten 
with Daniel Barenboim, will be published by Bloomsbury in March.
-- 
Monica Narula
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