"What Is Happening in the United States?"

Edward Said,
April 22, 2003

"If it was their war, it was also their government and their
politics. For the defenders of democracy to conspire with
plotters of a coup d'etat, no matter how cogent the reasons,
could not be hailed in the history books as the American
way. It was a step in the folly of self-betrayal." -- Barabara Tuchman, The March of Folly

 In a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate floor on March 19, the
day the war was launched against Iraq, Robert Byrd, Democrat of West
Virginia and the most eloquent speaker in that chamber, asked "what is
happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores
and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining
international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to
using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when
the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?" No one bothered to
answer him, but as the vast American military machine now planted in
Iraq begins to stir restlessly in other directions in the name of the
American people, their love of freedom, and their deep-seated values,
these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption of
democracy that we are living through.

 Let's examine first what US Middle East policy has wrought since George
W. Bush came to power almost three years ago in an election decided finally
by the Supreme Court, not by the popular vote. Even before the atrocities
of September 11, Bush's team had given Ariel Sharon's government a free
hand to colonize the West Bank and Gaza, to kill, detain and expel people
at will, to demolish their homes, expropriate their land, imprison them
by curfew and hundreds of military blockades, make life for them generally
speaking impossible; after 9/11, Sharon simply hitched his wagon to "the
war on terrorism" and intensified his unilateral depredations against a
defenseless civilian population, now under occupation for 36 years, despite
literally tens of UN Security Council Resolutions enjoining Israel to
withdraw and otherwise desist from its war crimes and human rights abuses.
Bush called Sharon a man of peace last June, and kept the 5 billion dollar
subsidy coming without even the vaguest hint that it was at risk because of
Israel's lawless brutality.

 On October 7, 2001 Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan, which
openedwith concentrated high-altitude bombing (increasingly an
"anti-terrorist" military tactic, bearing in its effects and structure a strong
resemblance to ordinary, garden variety terrorism) and by December had
installed in that devastated country a client regime with no effective power
beyond a few  streets in Kabul. There has been no significant US effort at
reconstruction, and it would seem the country has returned to its former
abjection, albeit  with a noticeable return of elements of the Taleban, as well
as a thriving drug-based economy.

 Since the summer of 2002, the Bush administration has conducted an
all-front campaign against the despotic government of Iraq and, having
unsuccessfully tried to push the Security Council into compliance, began
its war along with the United Kingdom against the country. I would say
that from about last November on, dissent disappeared from a mainstream
media swollen with a surfeit of ex-generals and ex-intelligence agents
sprinkled with recent terrorism and security experts drawn from the
Washington right-wing think tanks. Anyone who spoke up and actually
managed to appear was labeled anti-American by failed academics who
mounted websites to list "enemy" scholars who didn't toe the line.
Emails of the few visible public figures who struggled to say something
were swamped, their lives threatened, their ideas trashed and mocked by
media news readers who had just become the self-appointed,
all-too-embedded sentinels of America's war.

 An overwhelming torrent of crude as well as sophisticated material
appeared everywhere equating the tyranny of Saddam Hussein not only
with evil, but with every known crime: much of this in part was factually
correct but it eliminated from mention the extraordinarily important
role played by the US and Europe in fostering the man's rise, fuelling his
ruinous wars, and maintaining his power. No less a personage than the
egregious Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in the early 80's as a way of
assuring him of US approval for his catastrophic war against Iran. The
various US corporations who supplied Iraq with nuclear, chemical and
biological material for the weapons that we supposedly went to war for
were simply erased from the public record.

 But all this and more was deliberately obscured by both government
and media in manufacturing the case for the further destruction of Iraq
which has been taking place for the past month. The demonization of the
country and its strutting leader turned it into a simulacrum of a formidable
quasi-metaphysical threat whereas -- and this bears repeating -- its
demoralized and basically useless armed forces were a threat to no one
at all. What was formidable about Iraq was its rich culture, its complex
society, its long-suffering people: these were all made invisible, the
better to smash the country as if it were only a den of thieves and
murderers. Either without proof or with fraudulent information Saddam
was accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction that were a direct
threat to the US 7000 miles away. He was identical with the whole of Iraq, a
desert place "out there" (to this day most Americans have no idea where
Iraq is, what its history consists of, and what besides Saddam it contains)
destined for the exercise of US power unleashed illegally as a way of
cowing  the entire world in its Captain Ahab like quest for re-shaping
reality and  imparting democracy to everyone. At home the Patriot and
Terrorist Acts have given the government an unseemly grip over civil life.
A dispiritingly  quiescent population for the most part accepts the bilge,
passed off as fact,  about imminent security threats, with the result that
preventive detention,  illegal eavesdropping and a menacing sense of a
heavily policed public space have made even the university a cold, hard
place to be for anyone who tries to think and speak independently.

 The appalling consequences of the US and British intervention in Iraq
are only just beginning to unfold, first with the coldly calculated
destruction of its modern infrastructure, then with the looting and
burning of one of the world's richest civilizations, and finally the
totally cynical American attempt to engage a band of motley "exiles"
plus various large corporations in the supposed re-building of the country
and the appropriation not only of its oil but also its modern destiny. To
the dreadful scenes of looting and burning which in the end are the
occupying power's responsibility, Rumsfeld managed to put himself in a
class beyond even Hulagu. "Freedom is untidy," he said on one occasion,
and "stuff happens" on another. Remorse or sorrow were nowhere in
evidence. General Jay Garner, handpicked for the job, seems like a person
straight out of the TV-serial "Dallas." The Pentagon's favorite exile, Ahmad
Chalabi, for example, has intimated openly that he plans to sign a peace
treaty with Israel, hardly an Iraqi idea. Bechtel has already been awarded
a huge contract. This too in the name of the American people. The whole
business smacks of nothing so much as Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

 This is an almost total failure in democracy, ours as Americans, not
Iraq's. 70% of the American people are supposed to be for all this, but
nothing is more manipulative and fraudulent than polls of random
numbers of Americans who are asked whether they "support our
President and troops in time of war." As Senator Byrd said in his speech,
"there is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions
unanswered. A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our
solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even
while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq."
Who is going to ask questions now that that Middle Western farm boy
General Tommy Franks sits triumphantly with his staff around one of
Saddam's tables in a Baghdad palace?

 I am convinced that in nearly every way, this was a rigged, and neither a
necessary nor a popular war. The deeply reactionary Washington "research"
institutions that spawned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith and the rest provide
an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate
without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring what seems to
be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious, basically illicit policy of
global domination. Hence, the doctrine of military pre-emption, which was
never voted on either by the people of this country or their half-asleep
representatives. How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered
the government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed? And as
for planning and charting a strategic course for what in effect is by far the
most lavishly endowed military establishment in history, one that is fully
capable of dragging us into unending conflicts, that task is left to the various
ideologically based pressure groups such as the fundamentalist Christian
leaders like Franklin Graham who have been unleashed with their Bibles on
destitute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, and such lobbies as AIPAC, the
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, along with its associated think tanks
and research centers.

 What seems so monumentally criminal is that good, useful words like
"democracy" and "freedom" have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask
for pillage,  muscling in on territory, and the settling of scores. The American
program for the Arab world is the same as Israel's. Along with Syria, Iraq
theoretically represents the only serious long term military threat to Israel, and
therefore it had to be put out of commission for decades. What does it mean to
liberate and democratize a country when no one asked you to do it, and when in
the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time, fail miserably to
preserve public law and order? The mix of resentment and relief at Saddam's
cowardly disappearance that most Iraqis feel has brought with it little
understanding or compassion either from the US or from the other Arab states,
who have stood by
idly quarreling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad burned. What a
travesty of strategic planning when you assume that "natives" will welcome
your presence after you've bombed and quarantined them for thirteen years.
The truly preposterous mindset about American beneficence, and with it that
patronizing Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the
minutest levels of the media. In a story about a 70 year old Baghdad widow who
ran a cultural center from her house -- wrecked in the US raids -- and is now
beside herself with rage, NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises
her for having had "a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein," and then
piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, "and this from a
graduate of London University."

 Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons that weren't there, the Stalingrads
that didn't occur, the formidable artillery defenses that never happened, I
wouldn't be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made
in Moscow to let him out with his family and money in return for the country.
The war had gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush couldn't risk more of
the same in Baghdad. US National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice appeared in
Russia on April 7. Two days later, Baghdad fell on April 9. Draw your own
conclusions, but isn't it possible that as a result of discussions with the
Republican Guard mentioned  by Rumsfeld, Saddam bought himself out in
return for abandoning the whole thing to the Americans and their British
allies, who could then proclaim a brilliant victory.

 Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly, and Bush
looks like the moral equivalent of a cowboy sheriff who has just led his
righteous posse to a victorious showdown against an evil enemy. On matters
of the gravest importance to millions of people constitutional principles have
been violated and the electorate lied to unconscionably. We are the ones who
must have our democracy back. Enough of smoke and mirrors and smooth
talking hustlers.

Editors' note: This is a fuller version of what originally ran on the
CounterPunch site on April 21.