During the last
days of July, Representative Tom Delay (Republican) of Texas, the
House majority leader described routinely as one of the three or
four most powerful men in Washington, delivered himself of his
opinions regarding the roadmap and the future of peace in the Middle
East. What he had to say was meant as an announcement for a trip he
subsequently took to Israel and several Arab countries where, it is
reported, he articulated the same message. In no uncertain terms
Delay declared himself opposed to the Bush administration's support
for the roadmap, especially the provision in it for a Palestinian
state. "It would be a terrorist state," he said emphatically, using
the word "terrorist" -- as has become habitual in official American
discourse -- without regard for circumstance, definition or concrete
characteristics. He went on to add that he came by his ideas
concerning Israel by virtue of what he described as his convictions
as a "Christian Zionist", a phrase synonymous not only with support
for everything Israel does, but also for the Jewish state's
theological right to go on doing what it does regardless whether or
not a few million "terrorist" Palestinians get hurt in the process.
The sheer number of
people in the southwestern United States who think like Delay is an
imposing 60-70 million and, it should be noted, included among them
is none other than George W Bush who is also an inspired born-again
Christian for whom everything in the Bible is meant to be taken
literally. Bush is their leader and surely depends on their votes
for the 2004 election which, in my opinion, he will not win. And
because his presidency is threatened by his ruinous policies at home
and abroad he and his campaign strategists are trying to attract
more Christian right- wingers from other parts of the country, the
mid-West especially. Altogether then, the views of the Christian
Right (allied with the ideas and lobbying power of the rabidly
pro-Israeli neo-conservative movement) constitute a formidable force
in domestic American politics, which is the domain where, alas, the
debate about the Middle East takes place in America. One must always
remember that in America Palestine and Israel are regarded as local,
not foreign policy, matters.
Thus, were Delay's
pronouncements simply to have been either the personal opinions of a
religious enthusiast or the dreamlike ramblings of an
inconsequential visionary, one could dismiss them quickly as
nonsense. But they represent a language of power that is not easily
opposed in America, where so many citizens believe themselves to be
guided directly by God in what they see and believe and sometimes
do. John Ashcroft, the attorney- general, is reported to begin each
working day in his office with a collective prayer meeting. Fine,
people want to pray, they are constitutionally allowed total
religious liberty. But in Delay's case, by saying what he has said
against an entire race of people, the Palestinians, that they would
constitute a whole country of "terrorists", that is, enemies of
humankind in the current Washington definition of the word, he has
seriously hampered their progress towards self-determination and
gone some way in imposing further punishment and suffering on them,
all on religious grounds. By what right?
Consider the sheer
inhumanity and imperialist arrogance of Delay's position: from a
powerful eminence 10 thousand miles away people like him, who are as
ignorant about the actual life of Arab Palestinians as the man in
the moon, can actually rule against and delay Palestinian freedom
and assure years more of oppression and suffering just because he
thinks they are all terrorists and because his own Christian Zionism
-- where neither proof nor reason counts for very much -- tells him
so. So, in addition to the Israeli lobby here, to say nothing of the
Israeli government there, Palestinian men, women and children have
to endure more obstacles and more roadblocks placed in their way in
the US Congress. Just like that.
What struck me
about the Delay comments wasn't only their irresponsibility and
their easy, uncivilised (a word very much in use concerning the war
against terrorism) dismissal of thousands of people who have done
him no wrong whatever, but also the unreality, the delusional
unreality his statements share with so much of official Washington
so far as discussions of (and policy towards) the Middle East, the
Arabs and Islam are concerned. This has reached new levels of
intense, even inane, abstraction in the period since the events of
11 September. Hyperbole, the technique of finding more and more
excessive statements to describe and over-describe a situation, has
ruled the public realm, beginning of course with Bush himself whose
metaphysical statements about good and evil, the axis of evil, the
light of the almighty and his endless, dare I call them sickening
effusions about the evils of terrorism, have taken language about
human history and society to new, dysfunctional levels of pure,
ungrounded polemic. All of this laced with solemn sermons and
declarations to the rest of the world to be pragmatic, to avoid
extremism, to be civilised and rational, even as US policy makers
with untrammeled executive power can legislate the change of regime
here, an invasion there, a "reconstruction" of a country there, all
from within the confines of their plush air-conditioned Washington
offices. Is this a way of setting standards for civilised discussion
and advancing democratic values, including the very idea of
democracy itself?
One of the basic
themes of all Orientalist discourse since the mid-19th century is
that the Arabic language and the Arabs are afflicted with both a
mentality and a language that has no use for reality. Many Arabs
have come to believe this racist drivel, as if whole national
languages like Arabic, Chinese, or English directly represent the
minds of their users. This notion is part of the same ideological
arsenal used in the 19th century to justify colonial oppression:
"Negroes" can't speak properly therefore, according to Thomas
Carlyle, they must remain enslaved; "the Chinese" language is
complicated and therefore, according to Ernest Renan, the Chinese
man or woman is devious and should be kept down; and so on and so
forth. No one takes such ideas seriously today except when Arabs,
Arabic and Arabists are concerned.
In a paper he wrote
a few years ago Francis Fukuyama, the right-wing pontificator and
philosopher who was briefly celebrated for his preposterous "end of
history" idea, said that the State Department was well rid of its
Arabists and Arabic speakers because by learning that language they
also learned the "delusions" of the Arabs. Today every village
philosopher in the media, including pundits like Thomas Friedman,
chatters on in the same vein, adding in their scientific
descriptions of the Arabs that one of the many delusions of Arabic
is the commonly held "myth" that the Arabs have of themselves as a
people. According to such authorities as Friedman and Fouad Ajami,
the Arabs are simply a loose collection of vagrants, tribes with
flags, masquerading as a culture and a people. One might point out
that this is a hallucinatory Orientalist delusion, which has the
same status as the Zionist belief that Palestine was empty, and that
the Palestinians were not there and certainly don't count as a
people. One scarcely needs to argue against the validity of such
assumptions so obviously do they derive from fear and ignorance.
But that is not
all. Arabs are always being berated for their inability to deal with
reality, to prefer rhetoric to facts, to wallow in self-pity and
self-aggrandising rather than in sober recitals of the truth. The
new fashion is to refer to the UNDP Report of last year as an
"objective" account of Arab self-indictment. Never mind that the
report, as I have pointed out, is a shallow and insufficiently
reflective social science graduate student paper designed to prove
that Arabs can tell the truth about themselves, and it is pretty far
below the level of centuries of Arab critical writing from the time
of Ibn Khaldun to the present. All that is pushed aside, as is the
imperial context which the UNDP authors blithely ignore, the better
perhaps to prove that their thinking is in line with American
pragmatism.
Other experts often
say that, as a language, Arabic is imprecise and incapable of
expressing anything with real accuracy. In my opinion such
observations are so ideologically mischievous as not to require
argument. But I think we can get an idea of what drives such
opinions forward by looking for an instructive contrast at one of
the great successes of American pragmatism and how it shows how our
present leaders and authorities deal with reality in sober and
realistic terms. I hope the irony of what I am discussing will
quickly be evident. The example I have in mind is American planning
for post-war Iraq. There is a chilling account of this in 4 August
issue of the Financial Times in which we are informed that
Douglas Leith and Paul Wolfowitz, unelected officials who are among
the most powerful of the hawkish neo-conservatives in the Bush
administration with exceptionally close ties to Israel's Likud
Party, ran a group of experts in the Pentagon "who all along felt
that this [the war and its aftermath] was not just going to be a
cakewalk [a slang term for something so easy to do that little
effort would be needed], it [the whole thing] was going to be 60-90
days, a flip-over and hand-off... to Chalabi and the Iraqi National
Council. The Department of Defence could then wash its hands of the
whole affair and depart quickly, smoothly, and swiftly. And there
would be a democratic Iraq that was amenable to our wishes and
desires left in its wake. And that's all there was to it."
We now know, of
course, that the war was indeed fought on these premises and Iraq
militarily occupied on just those totally far-fetched imperialist
assumptions. Chalabi's record as informant and banker is, after all,
not of the best. And now no one needs to be reminded of what has
happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The terrible
shambles, from the looting and pillaging of libraries and museums
(which is absolutely the responsibility of the US military as
occupying power), the total breakdown of the infrastructure, the
hostility of Iraqis -- who are not after all a homogenous single
group -- to Anglo-American forces, the insecurity and shortages and,
above all, the extraordinary human -- I emphasise the word "human"
-- incompetence of Garner, Bremer and all their minions and soldiers
in adequately addressing the problems of post-war Iraq, all this
testifies to the kind of ruinous sham pragmatism and realism of
American thinking which is supposed to be in sharp contrast to that
of lesser pseudo-peoples like the Arabs who are full of delusions
and have a faulty language to boot. The truth of the matter is that
reality is neither at the individual's command (no matter how
powerful) nor does it necessarily adhere more closely to some
peoples and mentalities than to others. The human condition is made
up of experience and interpretation, and these can never be
completely dominated by power: they are also the common domain of
human beings in history. The terrible mistakes made by Wolfowitz and
Leith came down to their arrogant substitution of abstract and
finally ignorant language for a far more complex and recalcitrant
reality. The appalling results are still before us.
So let us not
accept any longer the ideological demagoguery that leaves language
and reality as the sole property of American power, or of so-called
Western perspectives. The core of the matter is of course
imperialism, that (in the end banal) self-assumed mission to rid the
world of evil figures like Saddam in the name of justice and
progress. Revisionist justifications of the invasion of Iraq and the
American war on terrorism that have become one of the least welcome
imports from an earlier failed empire, Britain, and have coarsened
discourse and distorted fact and history with alarming fluency, are
proclaimed by expatriate British journalists in America who don't
have the honesty to say straight out, yes, we are superior and
reserve the right to teach the natives a lesson anywhere in the
world where we perceive them to be nasty and backward. And why do we
have that right? Because those woolly-haired natives whom we know
from having ruled our empire for 500 years and now want America to
follow, have failed: they fail to understand our superior
civilisation, they are addicted to superstition and fanaticism, they
are unregenerate tyrants who deserve punishment and we, by God, are
the ones to do the job, in the name of progress and civilisation. If
some of these fickle journalistic acrobats (who have served so many
masters that they don't have any moral bearings at all) can also
manage to quote Marx and German scholars -- despite their avowed
anti-Marxism and their rank ignorance of any languages or
scholarship not English -- in their favour then how much cleverer
they seem. It's just racism at bottom though, no matter how dressed
up it is.
The problem is
actually a deeper and more interesting one than the polemicists and
publicists for American power have imagined. All over the world
people are all experiencing the quandary of a revolution in thought
and vocabulary in which American neo-liberalism and "pragmatism" are
made on the one hand by American policy-makers to stand for a
universal norm whereas in fact -- as we have seen in the Iraq
example I cited above -- there are all sorts of slippages and double
standards in the use of words like "realism", "pragmatism", and
other words like "secular" and "democracy" that need complete
rethinking and reevaluation. Reality is too complex and multifarious
to lend itself to jejune formulae like "a democratic Iraq amenable
to us would result". Such reasoning cannot stand the test of
reality. Meanings are not imposed from one culture on to another any
more than one language and one culture alone possesses the secret of
how to get things done efficiently.
As Arabs, I would
submit, and as Americans we have too long allowed a few
much-trumpeted slogans about "us" and "our" way to do the work of
discussion, argument and exchange. One of the major failures of most
Arab and Western intellectuals today is that they have accepted
without debate or rigorous scrutiny terms like secularism and
democracy, as if everyone knew what these words mean. America today
has the largest prison population of any country on earth; it also
has the largest number of executions than any country in the world.
To be elected president, you need not win the popular vote but you
must spend over $200 million. How do these things pass the test of
"liberal democracy?"
So rather than have
the terms of debate organised without scepticism around a few sloppy
terms like "democracy" and "liberalism" or around unexamined
conceptions of "terrorism", "backwardness" and "extremism", we
should be pressing for a more exacting, a more demanding kind of
discussion in which terms are defined from numerous viewpoints and
are always placed in concrete historical circumstances. The great
danger is that American "magical" thinking à la Wolfowitz, Cheney,
and Bush is being passed off as the supreme standard for all peoples
and languages to follow. In my opinion, and if Iraq is a salient
example, then we must not allow that simply to occur without
strenuous debate and probing analysis, and we mustn't be cowed into
believing that Washington's power is so irresistibly awesome. And so
far as the Middle East is concerned the discussion must include
Arabs and Muslims and Israelis and Jews as equal participants. I
urge everyone to join in and not leave the field of values,
definitions, and cultures uncontested. They are certainly not the
property of a few Washington officials, any more than they are the
responsibility of a few Middle Eastern rulers. There is a common
field of human undertaking being created and recreated, and no
amount of imperial bluster can ever conceal or negate that fact.
