An American Tragedy
By Edward Said
The Nation magazine, January 11/18, 1999
Seventy-nine percent of Americans say they are for the bombing of Iraq; 86 percent say
God loves them; 57 percent say they don't want Bill Clinton impeached; 62 percent say they
believe he bombed Iraq for good, not personal, reasons. And so on, while, over seventy
hours, 425 cruise missiles fell on Baghdad, darkness compounding the terrors of
bombardment. For the American home audience, everything about this attack has been
miniaturized and sanitized-small green images, tiny cluster bombs, invisible missiles,
three-second soundbites, abstract phrases like "degrading Saddam's assets ' 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 "Hoosane," not with several million people, nor with 6,000 years of
civilization, nor with the suffering of millions 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 a 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 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 December 18: "I'm very happy to hit Saddam over
the head.... But I want to know the answers," such answers presumably being US war
aims, or strategic objectives, as yet unspecific. There is no awareness among macho
commentators of actual Iraqi human beings, streets, water supply, electrical power, the
travail of daily life without access to food and shelter-just Saddam being "hit over
the head" by Operation Desert Fox. (Since, as US Ambassador to Britain Philip Lader
strongly implied, the ultimate aim of the mission was the physical removal of Saddam, the
Nazi analogy was no doubt helpful.)
Undoubtedly Saddam Hussein is a dreadful ruler who, through his nightmarish Baath Party
apparatus (to say nothing of ghoulish sons), continues to tyrannize the people. Of course,
he has continually provoked confrontations as a way of inflating his stature, but at what
point does it become immoral to extract the price of his malfeasance from the citizenry?
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 United States and Britain during the seventies and eighties, seen as a foil to Iran,
avidly courted by Western corporations hungry for the country's oil and eager to profit
from its modernizing ambition, its enormous industrial and agricultural potential? Even
his Arab enemies loved his swagger. When I was in Kuwait in 1985, a minister lectured me
on the greatness of Saddam, champion of the Arabs "against the Persians," as he
grandly put it, boasting that Kuwait was subsidizing the war against Iran.
Since 1990 Iraq has become the convenient devil of US foreign policy and a useful
testing ground for high-tech weapons. So far no one has been able to dislodge Saddam from
power, certainly not the sixty or seventy exile organizations that squabble among
themselves and receive CIA and Congressional aid. 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 made. Admittedly, Iraq cheated on its agreement with the United
Nations, but what country in similar circumstance wouldn't have? After each crisis, the
requirements on it increased: At America's behest, Richard Butler added
evermore-preposterous conditions to his inspections, demanding lists of the 14,000 people
associated with the Iraqi nuclear program, ordering a search of the Foreign Ministry-not
to mention sharing intelligence information about Iraq with Israel, an outright violation
of his UN mandate.
All the while, Iraq's defenseless people were offered nothing but punishment,
punishment so sadistic that Dennis Halliday, the UN administrator of the oil for food
program, could not tolerate it, and therefore resigned. To read the April 30 UNICEF report
on the effects of the sanctions, a detailed chronicle of malnutrition, rising illiteracy,
poverty, socioeconomic breakdown and collapse of medical facilities, is to come face to
face with US criminality. 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 networks have
eliminated dissent and critical views. Retired military people supply the viewer with
acres of technical information, most of it delivered in awestruck, proprietary and utterly
bland tones. NBC's star, Tom Brokaw, presented an eyewitness Baghdad report of a nearby
missile landing with the homey preface, "Here's what it's like to be there, up close
and personal." Yet for all that, Iraq simply doesn't exist. I searched the libraries
for recent books that describe it as a real country, not as a strategic problem. I found
only one, Nuha al Radi's excellent Baghdad Diary.
Finally, then, we have the man whose conflagration this is. A combination of
sentimentality and opportunism, there are no lengths to which Bill Clinton will not go to
rescue himself. He's tried them all: abject apology, brazen toughness, casuistic
sophistry, simpering patriotism and, since the second half of 1998, murderous air strikes.
Who besides the self-righteous and the lubricious cares about his oral sex and pizza in a
White House corridor with Monica? It's the homicidal forays against Sudan, Afghanistan and
now Iraq that are his true high crimes. Clearly, though, he knows how to exploit the
American penchant for cruelty toward lesser, dehumanized creatures, and just as clearly he
can elicit all the necessary ideological cant about backing "our" troops. A
population brainwashed for almost a decade that Iraq poses the greatest threat to the
world since Hitler, and with no time or opportunity to resist, does not stand in his way.
With no plan for what is to come after the attack and no conception of the disaster that
would follow Saddam's assassination in an enormous, ethnically diverse country whose
people are in any event too ground down to rise up against Baathist or any substitute
tyranny, Clinton simply refers sanctimoniously to UN resolutions and the international
community, leaving someone else to clean up the mess. Considering he is the leader of a
country that has, along with Israel, 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 the real scandal. But
such is the nature of US power that both Clinton and Saddam will survive to wreak more
havoc on new victims.
Edward Said is University Professor at Columbia
Source:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Human_Rights/American_Tragedy.html
