Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 20:23:18 -0700 (MST)
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Edward Said: Iraq: Clinton's Rampage



Clinton's Rampage
By Edward Said 

	Seventy-nine per cent of the American people say they are for the
bombing of Iraq, 86 per cent say that God loves them, 57 per cent don't want
Bill Clinton impeached, 62 per cent believe that he bombed Iraq for good,
rather than personal, reasons... and so on, while each evening 200 Cruise
missiles fall on Baghdad, darkness compounding the terrors of bombardment.
For the American home audience, everything about this attack has been
miniaturised and sanitised for living room delectation -- lots of reassuring
percentages, small green images, tiny cluster bombs, invisible missiles,
three-second sound bites, abstract phrases like "degrading Saddam's assets"
and "men and women in harm's way", 24,000 unseen troops on aircraft carriers
and cruisers, high-flying B-1 bombers and Tornadoes. Iraq (sometimes
pronounced "Eye-rack") has now become synonymous only with Saddam "Hoossein"
-- not with several million people, nor with an astounding 6,000 years of
civilisation, nor with the suffering of untold thousands who have endured
the most vicious discipline of economic sanctions in history. Unimpeachable
human rights agencies have estimated that 5,000 children die every month as
the result of the sanctions, but only a few public personalities -- former
Attorney-General Ramsey Clark chief among them -- have campaigned on behalf
of Iraq's innocent civilians. 

	Contrast these horrors with what Leslie Gelb, head of the Council on
Foreign Relations, was quoted as saying in the New York Times on 18
December: "I'm very happy to hit Saddam over the head...  But I want to know
the answers," those withheld answers presumably being American war aims, or
strategic objectives, as yet pretty unspecific. No concrete awareness among
macho commentators of actual Iraqi human beings, streets, water supply,
electrical power, the difficult travail of daily life without accessible
food and shelter. Just Saddam being hit over the head by Operation Desert
Fox (is it a complete coincidence that this massive, terribly one-sided
button-pushing exercise -- hardly a conflict -- is named after Hitler's
field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of the Afrika corps, or is it just the
clever phrasing of an inventive young wordsmith in the Pentagon?) 

	Undoubtedly Saddam Hussein is a dreadful ruler, a disaster for his
country.  Certainly he has lied to UNSCOM, tried to rebuild his weapons
programmes, and, through his nightmarish Baath Party apparatus (to say
nothing of his ghoulish sons), continues to tyrannise his people. Of course
he is responsible for continuing to provoke the Americans, but at what point
does it become plainly immoral to extract the price of his malfeasance from
his largely innocent people? Why must they suffer the burden of his rule as
well as the unconscionably protracted sanctions, plus the bombing? Shouldn't
we remind ourselves that Saddam was supported by the US and Britain during
the '70s and '80s, seen as a foil to Iran and a potential ally in the Gulf,
avidly courted by Western corporations hungry for the country's plentiful
oil supplies, eager to profit from its modernising ambition, and its
enormous industrial and agricultural potential? Even his Arab enemies loved
his swagger. When I was in Kuwait in 1985, a voluble minister gave me a
lecture on how great a man Saddam was, champion of the Arabs "against the
Persians", as he grandly put it, boasting that Kuwait was subsidising the
shameful war against Iran. 

	Since 1991, Iraq has become the convenient devil of US foreign
policy, linked to Islam, terrorism, fundamentalism and thereby targeted for
occasional military strikes and as a useful testing ground for high-tech
weapons. So far, no one has been able to dislodge Saddam from power,
certainly not the 60 or 70 exile organisations that squabble among
themselves and receive CIA and congressional aid to no avail. As for the
weapons inspectors and their mandate, it is difficult to imagine that any
sovereign country could ever have complied with such demands as they put. 
Admittedly, Iraq cheated, but which country in similar circumstances
wouldn't have? After each crisis the requirements increased: what Richard
Butler and his people did surely went far beyond any UN resolution, none of
which included the sharing of intelligence information about Iraq with
Israel. At the US's behest, Butler has been too zealous, always adding
preposterous conditions to his inspections, e.g. a demand for lists of the
14,000 people associated with the Iraqi nuclear programme, an order to enter
and search the Foreign Ministry, etc.

	The worst part of the UNSCOM mission was that Iraq's defenceless
people were never promised any lifting of the sanctions at all.  Punishment
was offered no matter what happened, with procedures in sheer sadistic
cruelty that Dennis Haliday, the UN expert in charge of administering the
oil for food programme, could not tolerate, therefore resigning. To read the
30 April UNICEF Report with its minutely detailed chronicle of malnutrition,
rising illiteracy, poverty, socio-economic breakdown, the absence of health
care, medicine and hospital facilities is to be amazed that a purportedly
humane country like America could keep turning the screws so callously. But
with people like Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and William Cohen in
charge -- all of them "policy" second-raters with no record of independent
thought -- what could one expect? No wonder the sycophantic Tony Blair felt
at ease in such mediocre company. 

	Even worse has been the public discourse about Iraq. Bad enough
during the Gulf War, the TV commentaries and reports have become more
efficient and technically clever, on the one hand, more bloodless and
uncritical on the other. All the main channels have totally eliminated
dissent or critical views.  The expert witnesses are retired military people
who supply the viewer with acres of technical information, most of it
delivered in awe-struck, patriotic, proprietary ("we've hit them again") and
utterly bland tones. Reporters in Baghdad are periodically required to tell
us "what it feels like". NBC's star, Tom Brokaw, presented an eyewitness
Baghdad report of a missile landing nearby with the homey preface, "Here's
what it's like to be there, up close and personal." For all the reporters
and anchormen, though, this is only a job, a crisis to be visited, then
vacated when it's over. Iraq in the interim simply doesn't exist. I searched
the libraries for recent books about Iraq that described it as a real
country, not as a strategic problem.  I found only one, Noha Al-Radi's
excellent Baghdad diary.

	Finally then, the man whose conflagration this is. A dangerous
combination of sentimentality and cynical opportunism, there are no lengths
to which Bill Clinton will not go to cover up and somehow try to rescue
himself. He's tried them all. Abject apology, brazen toughness, casuistic
sophistry ("it depends what 'is' is"), simpering patriotism, and, since the
second half of this year, murderous air strikes. Who cares about his sordid
oral sex and pizza in a White House corridor with Monica? It's his
unauthorised, homicidal forays against Sudan, Afghanistan and now Iraq that
are the truly impeachable crimes.  Clearly, though, he knows how to exploit
the American penchant for cruel wars of extermination against lesser,
dehumanised creatures, and just as clearly he can elicit all the necessary
ideological cant about backing "our"  forces during their ordeal at the
front. A brain-washed population with no time or opportunity to resist does
not stand in his way. 

	With no plan for what is to come after an attack that is intended
miraculously to remove Saddam (what does that aim have to do with causing
extensive "collateral damage?"), Clinton is prepared to face the disastrous
aftermath by sanctimoniously referring back to UN resolutions and the
international community, leaving someone else to clean up the mess. 
Considering that he is the leader of a country that, along with Israel, has
flouted more Security Council resolutions, has more unpaid UN bills, and has
refused to sign more international conventions (including those against
chemical and biological weapons)  than any other, this is truly outrageous.
But such is American power, and its almost totally negative result is that
both Clinton and Saddam will survive to wreak more havoc on new victims. 
______________________________________________

					Source: Al-Ahram Weekly
					URL: http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/
					Email: weeklyweb-AT-ahram.org.eg




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