"Who is in Charge?"

Edward Said


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 criticized recently for my anti-war

position by illiterates who claim that what I say is

an implied defense 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 modernization (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 behavior. 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 mobilization 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 defense 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 neo-conservatives 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 media 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 organizations 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 such 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 upon 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.



Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/628/op2.htm