Classified military footage released by WikiLeaks showing an attack by US military in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. This callous attack left 12 dead including two Reuters staff. Two Iraqi children were also seriously injured.
Watch online here: http://youtu.be/to3Ymw8L6ZI
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Slavoj Zizek: Iraq's False Promises
If you want to understand why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, not the National Security Strategy of the United States. Only the twisted logic of dreams can explain why the United States thinks that the aggressive pursuit of contradictory goals-promoting democracy, affirming U.S. hegemony, and ensuring stable energy supplies-will produce success.
To illustrate the weird logic of dreams, Sigmund Freud used to evoke a story about a borrowed kettle: When a friend accuses you of returning a borrowed kettle broken, your reply is, first, that you never borrowed the kettle; second, that you returned it unbroken; and third, that the kettle was already broken when you borrowed it. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms precisely what it endeavors to deny: that you, in fact, did borrow and break the kettle.
A similar string of inconsistencies characterized the Bush administration's public justifications for the U.S. attack on Iraq in early 2003. First, the administration claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which posed a "real and present danger" to his neighbors, to Israel, and to all democratic Western states. So far, no such weapons have been found (after more than 1,000 U.S. specialists have spent months looking for them). Then, the administration argued that even if Saddam does not have any WMD, he was involved with al Qaeda in the September 11 attacks and therefore should be punished and prevented from launching future assaults. But even U.S. President George W. Bush had to concede in September 2003 that the United States "had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Finally, there was the third level of justification, that even if there was no proof of a link with al Qaeda, Saddam's ruthless dictatorship was a threat to its neighbors and a catastrophe to its own people, and these facts were reason enough to topple it. True, but why topple Iraq and not other evil regimes, starting with Iran and North Korea, the two other members of Bush's infamous "axis of evil"?
So, if these reasons don't hold up to serious scrutiny and merely seem to suggest that the administration was misguided to do what it did, what, then, were the real underlying reasons for the attack? Effectively, there were three: first, a sincere ideological belief that the destiny of the United States is to bring democracy and prosperity to other nations; second, the urge to brutally assert and signal unconditional U.S. hegemony; and third, the need to control Iraqi oil reserves.
Each of the three levels works on its own and deserves to be taken seriously; none of them, including the spread of democracy, should be dismissed as a simple manipulation and lie. Each has its own contradictions and consequences, for good and ill. But taken together, they are dangerously inconsistent and incompatible and all but predestine the U.S. effort in Iraq to failure.
THE NOT-SO-QUIET AMERICAN
Americans have historically seen their role in the world in altruistic terms. "We just try to be good," they say, "to help others, to bring peace and prosperity, and look what we get in return." In fact, movies such as John Ford's The Searchers and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver or books like Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which provide fundamental insight into the naive benevolence of Americans, have never been more relevant than with today's global U.S. ideological offensive. As Greene said about his American protagonist, who sincerely wants to bring democracy and Western freedom to the Vietnamese, only to see his intentions totally misfire: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
The supposition underlying these good intentions is that underneath our skins, we are all Americans. If that is humanity's true desire, then all that Americans need to do is to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will embrace America's ideological dream. No wonder the United States has moved from "containing" the enemy to promoting a "capitalist revolution," as Stephen Schwartz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies put it in February 2003. The United States is now, as the defunct Soviet Union was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution.
But when Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union message, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity," this apparent burst of humility, in fact, concealed its totalitarian opposite. Every totalitarian leader claims that, in himself, he is nothing at all: His strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, whose deepest strivings only he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leader by definition not only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people. And does the same not hold for Bush's claim? It would have been easier if freedom effectively were to be just the United States' gift to other nations; that way, those who oppose U.S. policies would merely be against the policies of a single nation-state. But if freedom is God's gift to humanity, and the U.S. government sees itself as the chosen instrument for showering this gift on all the nations of the world, then those who oppose U.S. policies are rejecting the noblest gift of God to humanity.
As for the second reason, the urge to demonstrate unconditional U.S. hegemony, the Bush administration's National Security Strategy calls for translating America's "position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence" into "decades of peace, prosperity, and liberty." But neoconservative thinkers speak in balder terms what their brethren in the White House cannot. In their recent book, The War over Iraq, neoconservatives William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan write, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there.... We stand at the cusp of a new historical era.... This is a decisive moment.... It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with that statement: The U.S. attack on Iraq has effectively put the future of the international community at stake, raising fundamental questions about the "new world order" and what rules will regulate it.
Regarding the third reason for launching an attack, it would be simplistic to assume that the United States intended to take over Iraq's oil industry lock, stock, and barrel. But in a country that, as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, "floats on a sea of oil," the installation of a U.S.-blessed government that is committed to permitting foreign (read: U.S.) investment in its oil industry and that enjoys an influential perch at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was surely an important consideration for U.S. policymakers. Indeed, to ignore that consideration would have been a case of strategic malpractice on a grand scale.
AMERICA'S EMPIRE BURLESQUE
Of these three reasons, the key factor is the second one: using Iraq as a pretext or exemplary case to establish the parameters of the new world order, to assert the right of the United States to launch preventive strikes and thus to cement its status as the sole global policing power. The message behind the U.S. attack was not primarily addressed to the Iraqi people but to all of us witnessing the war-we were the true ideological and political targets.
At this point, one should ask the naive question: the United States as global policeman-why not? After all, the post-Cold-War world effectively begged for some global power to fill in the void. Ah, but there's the rub: The problem with today's United States is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not, i.e., that, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its interests. Indeed, in a perverse reversal of the old ecological slogan, the bumper sticker for the Bush administration's foreign policy could well be "act globally, think locally." Look, for example, at the U.S. decision to impose steel tariffs, ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization and certainly in violation of its own sacrosanct advice to developing countries to open themselves to the global market.
Another stunning example of U.S. double-think was the two-sided pressure it exerted on Serbia in the summer of 2003. U.S. officials demanded that Serbia deliver suspected war criminals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (in accordance with the logic of the global empire, which demands transnational judicial institutions); but they also simultaneously pressured Serbia to sign a bilateral treaty obliging it not to deliver to the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) any U.S. citizens suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with the logic of the nation-state). No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury.
And does the same inconsistency not hold for how the United States is waging the "war on terror"? The exemplary economic strategy of today's capitalism is outsourcing-handing over the "dirty" process of material production (but also publicity, design, accounting, etc.) to another company. Production takes place in, say, Indonesia, where environmental and labor standards are much lower than in the West, and the Western company that owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for violations by its contractors.
Now, something homologous is taking place with the interrogation of terror suspects, with torture "outsourced" to Third World allies (those same countries criticized in the U.S. State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices) who can coerce confessions without worrying about legal problems or public protest. "We can't legalize torture; it's contrary to American values," sniffed columnist Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, while nonetheless concluding that "we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty." And so it goes with First World democracies, which outsource more and more of their dirty undersides, whether telemarketing or torture, to other countries.
The opportunity to bring the war on terror within the scope of an international legal order has been squandered. Why? To borrow the words of Muhammad Said al-Sahaf, the colorful Iraqi information minister who, in one of his last press conferences during the war, reportedly denied that Americans controlled parts of Baghdad: "[The Americans] are not in control of anything-they don't even control themselves!" Simply put, U.S. policymakers lack the self-awareness to recognize, let alone reconcile, the contradictions between and among their intentions and their actions.
In February 2002, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we don't know." For Rumsfeld, these "unknown unknowns" represent the greatest threats facing the United States. But Rumsfeld forgot to add the crucial fourth term: the unknown knowns, things we don't know that we know-which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to, may pose an even greater threat. That is indeed the case with the reasons for this war. What is "unknown" (disavowed, ignored) is not primarily the problematic nature of those reasons as such (say, the fact that in spreading democracy, the United States is imposing its own version of democracy), but, rather, the inconsistency among those reasons. The United States is pursuing a series of goals (spreading democracy, asserting its hegemony, securing oil supplies) that are ultimately incompatible. Consider countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, conservative monarchies, but economic allies, deeply integrated into Western capitalism. Here, the United States has a very precise interest: For these nations to provide dependable oil reserves for the United States, they must remain undemocratic, since it is a safe bet that democratic elections in Saudi Arabia or Iraq would produce an Islamist, nationalist regime riding on anti-American attitudes. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," declared Bush in November 2003. But it did give Western countries relatively stable energy supplies, something that the United States is unlikely to sacrifice overnight on the altar of freedom.
Moreover, despite Bush's talk of a "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East," we know now what bringing democracy means: The United States and its "willing partners" ultimately decide if a country is ripe for democracy and what form that democracy should take. Witness Rumsfeld's comment in April 2003 that Iraq should not become a theocracy, but a tolerant secular country in which all religions and ethnic groups enjoyed the same rights. U.S. officials have reacted with barely muted discomfort to the possibility that a new Iraqi constitution might give Islam a privileged position. The irony here is twofold: Not only would it be nice if the United States were to demand the same from Israel with regard to Judaism, but while Saddam's Iraq already was a secular state, the likely result of democratic elections would be the privileging of Islam! One unnamed senior U.S. figure even stated, according to the British newspaper The Independent, "the first foreign policy gesture of a democratic Iraq would be to recognize Israel."
Instead, what is likely to emerge as a result of the U.S. occupation in Iraq is precisely a fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with a Muslim presence. It is as if, in a contemporary display of the "cunning of reason," some invisible hand of destiny repeatedly ensures that the U.S. intervention only makes more likely the outcomes the United States sought most to avoid.
Excerpts from U.S. President George W. Bush's speech on freedom in Iraq and the Middle East at the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy on Nov. 6, 2003.
The sacrifices of Americans have not always been recognized or appreciated, yet they have been worthwhile....
As changes come to the Middle Eastern region, those with power should ask themselves: Will they be remembered for resisting reform, or for leading it? In Iran, the demand for democracy is strong and broad, as we saw last month when thousands gathered to welcome home Shirin Ebadi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The regime in Teheran must heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people, or lose its last claim to legitimacy....
There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture. Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military-so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite. Successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law, instead of selectively applying the law to punish political opponents....
[Securing democracy in Iraq] is a massive and difficult undertaking-it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, and increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed-and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran-that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution....
...As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.
Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.
The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country...And we believe that freedom-the freedom we prize-is not for us alone. It is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
Working for the spread of freedom can be hard. Yet, America has accomplished hard tasks before. Our nation is strong; we're strong of heart.
To illustrate the weird logic of dreams, Sigmund Freud used to evoke a story about a borrowed kettle: When a friend accuses you of returning a borrowed kettle broken, your reply is, first, that you never borrowed the kettle; second, that you returned it unbroken; and third, that the kettle was already broken when you borrowed it. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms precisely what it endeavors to deny: that you, in fact, did borrow and break the kettle.
A similar string of inconsistencies characterized the Bush administration's public justifications for the U.S. attack on Iraq in early 2003. First, the administration claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which posed a "real and present danger" to his neighbors, to Israel, and to all democratic Western states. So far, no such weapons have been found (after more than 1,000 U.S. specialists have spent months looking for them). Then, the administration argued that even if Saddam does not have any WMD, he was involved with al Qaeda in the September 11 attacks and therefore should be punished and prevented from launching future assaults. But even U.S. President George W. Bush had to concede in September 2003 that the United States "had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Finally, there was the third level of justification, that even if there was no proof of a link with al Qaeda, Saddam's ruthless dictatorship was a threat to its neighbors and a catastrophe to its own people, and these facts were reason enough to topple it. True, but why topple Iraq and not other evil regimes, starting with Iran and North Korea, the two other members of Bush's infamous "axis of evil"?
So, if these reasons don't hold up to serious scrutiny and merely seem to suggest that the administration was misguided to do what it did, what, then, were the real underlying reasons for the attack? Effectively, there were three: first, a sincere ideological belief that the destiny of the United States is to bring democracy and prosperity to other nations; second, the urge to brutally assert and signal unconditional U.S. hegemony; and third, the need to control Iraqi oil reserves.
Each of the three levels works on its own and deserves to be taken seriously; none of them, including the spread of democracy, should be dismissed as a simple manipulation and lie. Each has its own contradictions and consequences, for good and ill. But taken together, they are dangerously inconsistent and incompatible and all but predestine the U.S. effort in Iraq to failure.
THE NOT-SO-QUIET AMERICAN
Americans have historically seen their role in the world in altruistic terms. "We just try to be good," they say, "to help others, to bring peace and prosperity, and look what we get in return." In fact, movies such as John Ford's The Searchers and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver or books like Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which provide fundamental insight into the naive benevolence of Americans, have never been more relevant than with today's global U.S. ideological offensive. As Greene said about his American protagonist, who sincerely wants to bring democracy and Western freedom to the Vietnamese, only to see his intentions totally misfire: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
The supposition underlying these good intentions is that underneath our skins, we are all Americans. If that is humanity's true desire, then all that Americans need to do is to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will embrace America's ideological dream. No wonder the United States has moved from "containing" the enemy to promoting a "capitalist revolution," as Stephen Schwartz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies put it in February 2003. The United States is now, as the defunct Soviet Union was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution.
But when Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union message, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity," this apparent burst of humility, in fact, concealed its totalitarian opposite. Every totalitarian leader claims that, in himself, he is nothing at all: His strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, whose deepest strivings only he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leader by definition not only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people. And does the same not hold for Bush's claim? It would have been easier if freedom effectively were to be just the United States' gift to other nations; that way, those who oppose U.S. policies would merely be against the policies of a single nation-state. But if freedom is God's gift to humanity, and the U.S. government sees itself as the chosen instrument for showering this gift on all the nations of the world, then those who oppose U.S. policies are rejecting the noblest gift of God to humanity.
As for the second reason, the urge to demonstrate unconditional U.S. hegemony, the Bush administration's National Security Strategy calls for translating America's "position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence" into "decades of peace, prosperity, and liberty." But neoconservative thinkers speak in balder terms what their brethren in the White House cannot. In their recent book, The War over Iraq, neoconservatives William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan write, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there.... We stand at the cusp of a new historical era.... This is a decisive moment.... It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with that statement: The U.S. attack on Iraq has effectively put the future of the international community at stake, raising fundamental questions about the "new world order" and what rules will regulate it.
Regarding the third reason for launching an attack, it would be simplistic to assume that the United States intended to take over Iraq's oil industry lock, stock, and barrel. But in a country that, as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, "floats on a sea of oil," the installation of a U.S.-blessed government that is committed to permitting foreign (read: U.S.) investment in its oil industry and that enjoys an influential perch at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was surely an important consideration for U.S. policymakers. Indeed, to ignore that consideration would have been a case of strategic malpractice on a grand scale.
AMERICA'S EMPIRE BURLESQUE
Of these three reasons, the key factor is the second one: using Iraq as a pretext or exemplary case to establish the parameters of the new world order, to assert the right of the United States to launch preventive strikes and thus to cement its status as the sole global policing power. The message behind the U.S. attack was not primarily addressed to the Iraqi people but to all of us witnessing the war-we were the true ideological and political targets.
At this point, one should ask the naive question: the United States as global policeman-why not? After all, the post-Cold-War world effectively begged for some global power to fill in the void. Ah, but there's the rub: The problem with today's United States is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not, i.e., that, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its interests. Indeed, in a perverse reversal of the old ecological slogan, the bumper sticker for the Bush administration's foreign policy could well be "act globally, think locally." Look, for example, at the U.S. decision to impose steel tariffs, ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization and certainly in violation of its own sacrosanct advice to developing countries to open themselves to the global market.
Another stunning example of U.S. double-think was the two-sided pressure it exerted on Serbia in the summer of 2003. U.S. officials demanded that Serbia deliver suspected war criminals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (in accordance with the logic of the global empire, which demands transnational judicial institutions); but they also simultaneously pressured Serbia to sign a bilateral treaty obliging it not to deliver to the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) any U.S. citizens suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with the logic of the nation-state). No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury.
And does the same inconsistency not hold for how the United States is waging the "war on terror"? The exemplary economic strategy of today's capitalism is outsourcing-handing over the "dirty" process of material production (but also publicity, design, accounting, etc.) to another company. Production takes place in, say, Indonesia, where environmental and labor standards are much lower than in the West, and the Western company that owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for violations by its contractors.
Now, something homologous is taking place with the interrogation of terror suspects, with torture "outsourced" to Third World allies (those same countries criticized in the U.S. State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices) who can coerce confessions without worrying about legal problems or public protest. "We can't legalize torture; it's contrary to American values," sniffed columnist Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, while nonetheless concluding that "we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty." And so it goes with First World democracies, which outsource more and more of their dirty undersides, whether telemarketing or torture, to other countries.
The opportunity to bring the war on terror within the scope of an international legal order has been squandered. Why? To borrow the words of Muhammad Said al-Sahaf, the colorful Iraqi information minister who, in one of his last press conferences during the war, reportedly denied that Americans controlled parts of Baghdad: "[The Americans] are not in control of anything-they don't even control themselves!" Simply put, U.S. policymakers lack the self-awareness to recognize, let alone reconcile, the contradictions between and among their intentions and their actions.
In February 2002, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we don't know." For Rumsfeld, these "unknown unknowns" represent the greatest threats facing the United States. But Rumsfeld forgot to add the crucial fourth term: the unknown knowns, things we don't know that we know-which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to, may pose an even greater threat. That is indeed the case with the reasons for this war. What is "unknown" (disavowed, ignored) is not primarily the problematic nature of those reasons as such (say, the fact that in spreading democracy, the United States is imposing its own version of democracy), but, rather, the inconsistency among those reasons. The United States is pursuing a series of goals (spreading democracy, asserting its hegemony, securing oil supplies) that are ultimately incompatible. Consider countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, conservative monarchies, but economic allies, deeply integrated into Western capitalism. Here, the United States has a very precise interest: For these nations to provide dependable oil reserves for the United States, they must remain undemocratic, since it is a safe bet that democratic elections in Saudi Arabia or Iraq would produce an Islamist, nationalist regime riding on anti-American attitudes. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," declared Bush in November 2003. But it did give Western countries relatively stable energy supplies, something that the United States is unlikely to sacrifice overnight on the altar of freedom.
Moreover, despite Bush's talk of a "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East," we know now what bringing democracy means: The United States and its "willing partners" ultimately decide if a country is ripe for democracy and what form that democracy should take. Witness Rumsfeld's comment in April 2003 that Iraq should not become a theocracy, but a tolerant secular country in which all religions and ethnic groups enjoyed the same rights. U.S. officials have reacted with barely muted discomfort to the possibility that a new Iraqi constitution might give Islam a privileged position. The irony here is twofold: Not only would it be nice if the United States were to demand the same from Israel with regard to Judaism, but while Saddam's Iraq already was a secular state, the likely result of democratic elections would be the privileging of Islam! One unnamed senior U.S. figure even stated, according to the British newspaper The Independent, "the first foreign policy gesture of a democratic Iraq would be to recognize Israel."
Instead, what is likely to emerge as a result of the U.S. occupation in Iraq is precisely a fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with a Muslim presence. It is as if, in a contemporary display of the "cunning of reason," some invisible hand of destiny repeatedly ensures that the U.S. intervention only makes more likely the outcomes the United States sought most to avoid.
Excerpts from U.S. President George W. Bush's speech on freedom in Iraq and the Middle East at the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy on Nov. 6, 2003.
The sacrifices of Americans have not always been recognized or appreciated, yet they have been worthwhile....
As changes come to the Middle Eastern region, those with power should ask themselves: Will they be remembered for resisting reform, or for leading it? In Iran, the demand for democracy is strong and broad, as we saw last month when thousands gathered to welcome home Shirin Ebadi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The regime in Teheran must heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people, or lose its last claim to legitimacy....
There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture. Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military-so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite. Successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law, instead of selectively applying the law to punish political opponents....
[Securing democracy in Iraq] is a massive and difficult undertaking-it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, and increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed-and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran-that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution....
...As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.
Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.
The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country...And we believe that freedom-the freedom we prize-is not for us alone. It is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
Working for the spread of freedom can be hard. Yet, America has accomplished hard tasks before. Our nation is strong; we're strong of heart.
Iraq's False Promises - Foreign Policy (lacan.com) (Jan./Feb.)
Today, Iraq. Tomorrow … Democracy? by Slavoj Zizek
Much more is at stake in this war than the future of Saddam Hussein
The one good argument for war against Iraq is evoked by Christopher Hitchens: The majority of Iraqis are Saddam’s victims, and they would be really glad to be rid of him. He is such a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in whatever form is a much brighter prospect for Iraqi citizens. We are not talking here of “bringing Western democracy to Iraq,” but of just getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical. Do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?
In the same vein, I remember dozens of Western leftists in the early ‘90s who proudly crowed that “Yugoslavia still exists,” and reproached me for betraying the unique chance of maintaining Milosevic’s Yugoslavia—to which I always answered that I am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint Western leftist dreams. Few attitudes are more crassly ideological than a tenured Western academic arrogantly dismissing (or, even worse, “understanding”) an Eastern European from an ex-communist country who longs for Western liberal democracy and some consumer goods.
However, it is all too easy to slip from this recognition to the notion that “under their skin, Iraqis are just like us, and really want the same as we do.” All we need to do is just give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will join us in our ideological dream. No wonder an American official used the term “capitalist revolution” to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their revolution all around the world. They have moved from “containing” the enemy to a more aggressive stance. Like the defunct Soviet Union decades ago, the United States is now the country subversively fomenting world revolution. Bush recently declared: “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.” Indeed, and the United States just happens to be the chosen instrument for distributing this gift.
Abstract pacifism is intellectually stupid and morally wrong—one has to stand up against a threat. Of course the fall of Saddam would be a relief to a large majority of Iraqi people, and a whiff of liberal hypocrisy does taint many of the stated reasons against war. But the impending invasion and occupation of Iraq is still wrong—because who is leading it makes it wrong. This is not a question of war or peace in the short term, but of the “gut feeling” that something is terribly wrong with this war, that something will irretrievably change with it.
———————
One of Jacques Lacan’s more outrageous statements is that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his unfaithful wife is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. The same should be said today about the claim that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!” Even if this claim is true (and it probably is, at least to some degree), it is still false with regard to the position from which it is enunciated. Everyone knows that this war is about more than weapons of mass destruction. But it is about more than oil, too. As ardent hawks William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan write in their recent The War Over Iraq, the impending occupation “is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century.”
One cannot but agree: The future of the international community is at stake now—the new rules that will regulate it, what the new world order will be. We are in the midst of a “silent revolution,” in which the unwritten rules that determine the most elementary international logic are changing. Washington scolded German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining an anti-war stance supported by the large majority of Germans. In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94 percent of the people are opposed to allowing U.S. troops in their country for the war. Where is democracy here? Those who pose as global defenders of democracy are the ones who are effectively undermining it.
It is crucial to remember that the present regime in Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one, out of touch with Muslim fundamentalist populism. Obviously, Saddam only superficially flirts with pan-Arab Muslim sentiment. As his past clearly demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving for power, who shifts alliances when it fits his purposes—first against Iran to grab their oil fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason, bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied with the United States. Saddam is not a fundamentalist obsessed with the “Great Satan,” ready to blow the world apart just to get him. What can emerge as a result of U.S. occupation, however, is a truly fundamentalist Muslim, anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Muslim countries.
Direct American occupation of a large and key Arab country—how could this not generate a reaction of universal hatred? One can already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and how that will force the U.S. government to impose a permanent high-alert emergency state. At this point, one cannot resist a slightly paranoid temptation: What if the people around Bush know this, what if this “collateral damage” is the true aim of the entire operation? What if the true target of the “war on terror” is American society itself—the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?
———————
On March 5, MSNBC’s Buchanan & Press show displayed a photo of the recently captured Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the “third man of al-Qaeda”—a mean visage, in an unspecified nightgown prison-dress, half opened and with something like bruises half-discernible, hints that he was already tortured. Pat Buchanan’s fast voice was asking: “Should this man who knows all the names, all the detailed plans for the future terrorist attacks on the United States, be tortured, so that we get all this out of him?” The horror was that the photo already suggested the answer. No wonder the response of other commentators and viewers’ calls was an overwhelming “Yes!”
This is a pretty close realization of what Orwell imagined in 1984’s “hate sessions,” where the citizens are shown photos of the traitors and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story goes on: A day later, a FOX News commentator claimed that we are allowed to do with this prisoner whatever we want—deprive him of sleep, break his fingers, etc.—because he is “a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever.” That such public statements are possible today is the true catastrophe.
We should therefore be very attentive not to fight ancillary battles: the debates on how bad Saddam is, or on how much the war will cost, even on how well (or poorly) the occupation is proceeding. The focus should be on what effectively goes on in our culture, on what kind of society is emerging here as the result of the “war on terror.” The ultimate result of this war will be a change in our political order.
The one good argument for war against Iraq is evoked by Christopher Hitchens: The majority of Iraqis are Saddam’s victims, and they would be really glad to be rid of him. He is such a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in whatever form is a much brighter prospect for Iraqi citizens. We are not talking here of “bringing Western democracy to Iraq,” but of just getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical. Do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?
In the same vein, I remember dozens of Western leftists in the early ‘90s who proudly crowed that “Yugoslavia still exists,” and reproached me for betraying the unique chance of maintaining Milosevic’s Yugoslavia—to which I always answered that I am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint Western leftist dreams. Few attitudes are more crassly ideological than a tenured Western academic arrogantly dismissing (or, even worse, “understanding”) an Eastern European from an ex-communist country who longs for Western liberal democracy and some consumer goods.
However, it is all too easy to slip from this recognition to the notion that “under their skin, Iraqis are just like us, and really want the same as we do.” All we need to do is just give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will join us in our ideological dream. No wonder an American official used the term “capitalist revolution” to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their revolution all around the world. They have moved from “containing” the enemy to a more aggressive stance. Like the defunct Soviet Union decades ago, the United States is now the country subversively fomenting world revolution. Bush recently declared: “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.” Indeed, and the United States just happens to be the chosen instrument for distributing this gift.
Abstract pacifism is intellectually stupid and morally wrong—one has to stand up against a threat. Of course the fall of Saddam would be a relief to a large majority of Iraqi people, and a whiff of liberal hypocrisy does taint many of the stated reasons against war. But the impending invasion and occupation of Iraq is still wrong—because who is leading it makes it wrong. This is not a question of war or peace in the short term, but of the “gut feeling” that something is terribly wrong with this war, that something will irretrievably change with it.
———————
One of Jacques Lacan’s more outrageous statements is that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his unfaithful wife is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. The same should be said today about the claim that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!” Even if this claim is true (and it probably is, at least to some degree), it is still false with regard to the position from which it is enunciated. Everyone knows that this war is about more than weapons of mass destruction. But it is about more than oil, too. As ardent hawks William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan write in their recent The War Over Iraq, the impending occupation “is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century.”
One cannot but agree: The future of the international community is at stake now—the new rules that will regulate it, what the new world order will be. We are in the midst of a “silent revolution,” in which the unwritten rules that determine the most elementary international logic are changing. Washington scolded German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining an anti-war stance supported by the large majority of Germans. In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94 percent of the people are opposed to allowing U.S. troops in their country for the war. Where is democracy here? Those who pose as global defenders of democracy are the ones who are effectively undermining it.
It is crucial to remember that the present regime in Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one, out of touch with Muslim fundamentalist populism. Obviously, Saddam only superficially flirts with pan-Arab Muslim sentiment. As his past clearly demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving for power, who shifts alliances when it fits his purposes—first against Iran to grab their oil fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason, bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied with the United States. Saddam is not a fundamentalist obsessed with the “Great Satan,” ready to blow the world apart just to get him. What can emerge as a result of U.S. occupation, however, is a truly fundamentalist Muslim, anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Muslim countries.
Direct American occupation of a large and key Arab country—how could this not generate a reaction of universal hatred? One can already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and how that will force the U.S. government to impose a permanent high-alert emergency state. At this point, one cannot resist a slightly paranoid temptation: What if the people around Bush know this, what if this “collateral damage” is the true aim of the entire operation? What if the true target of the “war on terror” is American society itself—the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?
———————
On March 5, MSNBC’s Buchanan & Press show displayed a photo of the recently captured Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the “third man of al-Qaeda”—a mean visage, in an unspecified nightgown prison-dress, half opened and with something like bruises half-discernible, hints that he was already tortured. Pat Buchanan’s fast voice was asking: “Should this man who knows all the names, all the detailed plans for the future terrorist attacks on the United States, be tortured, so that we get all this out of him?” The horror was that the photo already suggested the answer. No wonder the response of other commentators and viewers’ calls was an overwhelming “Yes!”
This is a pretty close realization of what Orwell imagined in 1984’s “hate sessions,” where the citizens are shown photos of the traitors and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story goes on: A day later, a FOX News commentator claimed that we are allowed to do with this prisoner whatever we want—deprive him of sleep, break his fingers, etc.—because he is “a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever.” That such public statements are possible today is the true catastrophe.
We should therefore be very attentive not to fight ancillary battles: the debates on how bad Saddam is, or on how much the war will cost, even on how well (or poorly) the occupation is proceeding. The focus should be on what effectively goes on in our culture, on what kind of society is emerging here as the result of the “war on terror.” The ultimate result of this war will be a change in our political order.
Today, Iraq. Tomorrow ... Democracy? - In These Times (Mar. 18)
THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE IS THE TRUE DANGER? by Slavoj Zizek
Cathy Ivory image We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle which Freud quotes in order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. For Freud, such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments of course confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny - that I returned you a broken kettle... Do we not encounter the same inconsistency when high US officials try to justify the attack on Iraq? (1) There is a link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda, so Saddam should be punished as part of the revenge for 9/11; (2) even if there was no link between Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, they are united in their hatred of the US - Saddam's regime is a really bad one, a threat not only to the US, but also to its neighbors, and we should liberate the Iraqi people; (3) the change of regime in Iraq will create the conditions for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is that there are TOO MANY reasons for the attack...
Furthermore, one is almost tempted to claim that, within the space of this reference to the Freudian logic of dreams, the Iraqi oil supplies function as the famous "umbilical cord" of the US justification(s) - almost tempted, since it would perhaps be more reasonable to claim that there are also three REAL reasons for the attack: (1) the control of the Iraqi oil reserves; (2) the urge to brutally assert and signal the unconditional US hegemony; (3) the "sincere" ideological belief that the US are bringing to other nations democracy and prosperity. And it seems as if these three "real" reasons are the "truth" of the three official reasons: (1) is the truth of the urge to liberate Iraqis; (2) is the truth of the claim the attack on Iraq will help to resolve the Middle East conflict; (3) is the truth of the claim that there is a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. - And, incidentally, opponents of the war seem to repeat the same inconsistent logic: (1) Saddam is really bad, we also want to see him toppled, but we should give inspectors more time, since inspectors are more efficient; (2) it is all really about the control of oil and American hegemony - the true rogue state which terrorizes others are the US themselves; (3) even if successful, the attack on Iraq will give a big boost to a new wave of the anti-American terrorism; (4) Saddam is a murderer and torturer, his regime a criminal catastrophe, but the attack on Iraq destined to overthrow Saddam will cost too much...
The one good argument for war is the one recently evoked by Christopher Hitchens: one should not forget that the majority of Iraqis effectively are Saddam's victims, and they would be really glad to get rid of them. He was such a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in WHATEVER form may seem a much brighter prospect to them with regard to daily survival and much lower level of fear. We are not talking here of "bringing Western democracy to Iraq," but just of getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical - do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?
One can make even a more general point here: what about pro-Castro Western Leftists who despise what Cubans themselves call "gusanos /worms/," those who emigrated - but, with all sympathy for the Cuban revolution, what right does a typical middle class Western Leftist have to despise a Cuban who decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment, but also because of poverty which goes up to simple hunger? In the same vein, I myself remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western Leftists who proudly threw in my face how for them, Yugoslavia still exists, and reproached me for betraying the unique chance of maintaining Yugoslavia - to which I always answered that I am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint Western Leftist dreams... There are effectively few things more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological (if this word has any meaning today, it should be applied here) than a tenured Western academic Leftist arrogantly dismissing (or, even worse, "understanding" in a patronizing way) an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs for Western liberal democracy and some consumerist goods... However, it is all too easy to slip from this fact to the notion that "under their skin, Iraqis are also like us, and really want the same as we do." The old story will repeat itself: America brings to the people new hope and democracy, but, instead of hailing the US army, the ungrateful people do want it, they suspect a gift in the gift, and America then reacts as a child with hurt feelings because of the ingratitude of those it selflessly helped.
The underlying presupposition is the old one: under our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all Americans, that is our true desire - so all that is needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will join us in our ideological dream... No wonder that, in February 2003, an American representative used the word "capitalist revolution" to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their revolution all around the world. No wonder they moved from "containing" the enemy to a more aggressive stance. It is the US which is now, as the defunct USSR was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. When Bush recently said "Freedom is not America's gift to other nations, it is god's gift to humanity," this apparent modesty nonetheless, in the best totalitarian fashion, conceals its opposite: yes, BUT it is nonetheless the US which perceives itself as the chosen instrument of distributing this gift to all the nations of the world!
The idea to "repeat Japan in 1945," to bring democracy to Iraq, which will then serve as model for the entire Arab world, enabling people to get rid of the corrupt regimes, immediately faces an insurmountable obstacle: what about Saudi Arabia where it is in the vital US interest that the country does NOT turn into democracy? The result of democracy in Saudi Arabia would have been either the repetition of Iran in 1953 (a populist regime with an anti-imperialist twist) or of Algeria a couple of years ago, when the "fundamentalists" WON the free elections.
There is nonetheless a grain of truth in Rumsfeld's ironic pun against the "old Europe." The French-German united stand against the US policy apropos Iraq should be read against the background of the French-German summit a month ago in which Chirac and Schroeder basically proposed a kind of dual Franco-German hegemony over the European Community. So no wonder that anti-Americanism is at its strongest in "big" European nations, especially France and Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One often hears the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second-rate (ex-)world powers, countries like United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal of "Americanization" in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe. The leveling of weight between larger and smaller Nation-States should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European post-Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of the wounded Narcissism of the European "great nations." And this great-state-nationalism is not just a feature external to the (failure of) the present opposition; it affects the very way France and Germany articulated this opposition. Instead of doing, even more actively, precisely what Americans are doing - MOBILIZING the "new European" states on their own politico-military platform, ORGANIZING the common new front -, France and Germany arrogantly acted alone.
In the recent French resistance against the war on Iraq, there definitely is a clear echo of the "old decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting, by new resolutions upon resolutions - all this reminiscent of the inactivity of the League of Nations against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call "let the inspectors do their work" clearly IS hypocritical: they are only allowed to do the work because there is a credible threat of military intervention. Not to mention the French neocolonialism in Africa (from Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French role in the Rwanda crisis and massacres)? And about the French role in the Bosnian war? Furthermore, as it was made clear a couple of months ago, is it not clear that France and Germany worry about their own hegemony in Europe?
Is the war on Iraq not the moment of truth when the "official" political distinctions are blurred? Generally, we live in a topsy-turvy world in which Republicans freely spend money, creating record budget deficits, while Democrats practice budget balance; in which Republicans, who thunder against big government and preach devolution of power to states and local communities, are in the process of creating the strongest state mechanism of control in the entire history of humanity. And the same applies to post-Communist countries. Symptomatic is here the case of Poland: the most ardent supporter of the US politics in Poland is the ex-Communist president Kwasniewski (who is even mentioned as the future secretary of NATO, after George Robertson), while the main opposition to the participation of Poland in the anti-Iraq coalition comes from the Rightist parties. Towards the end of January 2003, the Polish bishops also demanded from the government that it should add to the contract which regulates the membership of Poland in the EU a special paragraph guaranteeing that Poland will "retain the right to keep its fundamental values as they are formulated in its constitution" - by which, of course, are meant the prohibition of abortion, of euthanasia and of the same-sex marriages.
The very ex-Communist countries which are the most ardent supporters of the US "war on terror" deeply worry that their cultural identity, their very survival as nations, is threatened by the onslaught of cultural "americanization" as the price for the immersion into global capitalism - we thus witness the paradox of pro-Bushist anti-Americanism. In Slovenia, my own country, there is a similar inconsistency: the Rightist nationalist reproach the ruling Center-Left coalition that, although it is publicly for joining NATO and supporting the US anti-terrorist campaign, it is secretly sabotaging it, participating in it for opportunist reasons, not out of conviction. At the same time, however, it is reproaching the ruling coalition that it wants to undermine Slovene national identity by advocating full Slovene integration into the Westernized global capitalism and thus drowning Slovenes into contemporary Americanized pop-culture. The idea is that the ruling coalition sustains pop culture, stupid TV amusement, mindless consumption, etc., in order to turn Slovenes into an easily manipulated crowd unable of serious reflection and firm ethical posture... In short, the underlying motif is that the ruling coalition stands for the "liberal-Communist plot" : ruthless unconstrained immersion in global capitalism is perceived as the latest dark plot of ex-Communists enabling them to retain their secret hold on power.
The almost tragic misunderstanding is that the nationalists, on the one hand, unconditionally support NATO (under the US command), reproaching the ruling coalition with secretly supporting antiglobalists and anti-American pacifists, while, on the other hand, they worry about the fate of Slovene identity in the process of globalization, claiming that the ruling coalition wants to throw Slovenia into the global whirlpool, not worrying about the Slovene national identity. Ironically, the new emerging socio-ideological order these nationalist conservatives are bemoaning reads like the old New Left description of the "repressive tolerance" and capitalist freedom as the mode of appearance of unfreedom. Here, the example of Italy is crucial, with Berlusconi as prime minister: the staunchest supporter of the US AND the agent of the TV-idiotizing of the public opinion, turning politics into a media show and running a large advertisement and media company.
Where, then, do we stand with reasons pro et contra? Abstract pacifism is intellectually stupid and morally wrong - one has to stand up against a threat. Of course the fall of Saddam would have been a relief to a large majority of the Iraqi people. Even more, of course the militant Islam is a horrifying anti-feminist etc. ideology. Of course there is something of a hypocrisy in all the reasons against: the revolt should come from Iraqi people themselves; we should not impose our values on them; war is never a solution; etc. BUT, although all this is true, the attack is wrong - it is WHO DOES IT that makes it wrong. The reproach is: WHO ARE YOU TO DO THIS? It is not war or peace, it is the correct "gut feeling" that there is something terribly wrong with THIS war, that something will irretrievably change with it.
One of Jacques Lacan's outrageous statements is that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological; along the same lines, one could say that, even of most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls...), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason WHY the Nazis NEEDED anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. And the same should be said today, apropos of the US claim "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!" - even if this claim is true (and it probably is, at least to some degree), it is still false with regard to the position from which it is enunciated.
Everyone fears the catastrophic outcome of the US attack on Iraq: an ecological catastrophe of gigantic proportions, high US casualties, a terrorist attack in the West... In this way, we already accept the US standpoint - and it is easy to imagine how, if the war will be over soon, in a kind of repetition of the 1990 Gulf War, if Saddam's regime will disintegrate fast, there will be a universal sigh of relief even among many present critics of the US policy. One is even tempted to consider the hypothesis that the US are on purpose fomenting this fear of an impending catastrophe, counting on the universal relief when the catastrophe will NOT occur... This, however, is arguably the greatest true danger. That is to say, one should gather the courage to proclaim the opposite: perhaps, the bad military turn for the US would be the best thing that can happen, a sobering piece of bad news which would compel all the participants to rethink their position.
On 9/11 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on 11/9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. 11/9 announced the "happy 90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy has in principle won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global liberal world community lurks round the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are just empirical and contingent, local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over; in contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy 90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the US-Mexican border. The prospect of a new global crisis is looming: economic collapses, military and other catastrophes, emergency states...
And when politicians start to directly justify their decisions in ethical terms, one can be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up such dark threatening horizons. It is the very inflation of abstract ethical rhetorics in George W. Bush's recent public statements (of the "Does the world have the courage to act against the Evil or not?" type) which manifests the utter ETHICAL misery of the US position - the function of ethical reference is here purely mystifying, it merely serves to mask the true political stakes, which are not difficult to discern. In their recent The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. /.../ We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. /.../ This is a decisive moment. /.../ It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with it: it is effectively the future of international community which is at stake now - the new rules which will regulate it, what the new world order will be. What is going on now is the next logical step of the US dismissal of the Hague court.
The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution for human rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There must be a recognition that we are all members of one human family. We have to create new institutions. This is one of them. This is another step forward in humanity's slow march toward civilization." However, while human rights groups have hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone for international justice since top Nazis were tried by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces stiff opposition from the United States, Russia and China. The United States says the court would infringe on national sovereignty and could lead to politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even weighing legislation authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the court will be based, in the event prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy paradox here is that the US thus rejected the jurisdiction of a tribunal which was constituted with the full support (and votes) of the US themselves! Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the Hague, not be given the right to claim that, since the US reject the legality of the international jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal, the same argumentation should hold also for him? And the same goes for Croatia: the US are now exerting tremendous pressure onto the Croat government to deliver to the Hague court a couple of its generals accused of war crimes during the struggles in Bosnia - the reaction is, of course, how can they ask this of US when THEY do not recognize the legitimacy of the Hague court? Or are the US citizens effectively "more equal than others"? If one simply universalizes the underlying principles of the Bush-doctrine, does India not have a full right to attack Pakistan? It does directly support and harbor anti-Indian terror in Kashmir, and it possesses (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction. Not to mention the right of China to attack Taiwan, and so on, with unpredictable consequences...
Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "silent revolution," in the course of which the unwritten rules which determine the most elementary international logic are changing? The US scold Gerhardt Schroeder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining a stance supported by a large majority of the population, plus, according to the polls in the mid-February, around 59% of the US population itself (who oppose strike against Iraq without the UN support). In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94% of the people are opposed to allowing the US troops' presence for the war against Iraq - where is democracy here? Every old Leftist remembers Marx's reply, in The Communist Manifesto, to the critics who reproached the Communists that they aim at undermining family, property, etc.: it is the capitalist order itself whose economic dynamics is destroying the traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today than in Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the population. In the same vein, is it not that precisely those who pose today as global defenders of democracy are effectively undermining it? In a perverse rhetorical twist, when the pro-war leaders are confronted with the brutal fact that their politics is out of tune with the majority of their population, they take recourse to the commonplace wisdom that "a true leader leads, he does not follow" - and this from leaders otherwise obsessed with opinion polls...
The true dangers are the long-term ones. In what resides perhaps the greatest danger of the prospect of the American occupation of Iraq? The present regime in Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one, out of touch with the Muslim fundamentalist populism - it is obvious that Saddam only superficially flirts with the pan-Arab Muslim sentiment. As his past clearly demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving for power, and shifting alliances when it fits his purposes - first against Iran to grab their oil fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason, bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied to the US - what Saddam is not is a fundamentalist obsessed with the "big Satan," ready to blow the world apart just to get him. However, what can emerge as the result of the US occupation is precisely a truly fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with Muslim presence.
One can surmise that the US are well aware that the era of Saddam and his non-fundamentalist regime is coming to an end in Iraq, and that the attack on Iraq is probably conceived as a much more radical preemptive strike - not against Saddam, but against the main contender for Saddam's political successor, a truly fundamentalist Islamic regime. Yes in this way, the vicious cycle of the American intervention gets only more complex: the danger is that the very American intervention will contribute to the emergence of what America most fears, a large united anti-American Muslim front. It is the first case of the direct American occupation of a large and key Arab country - how could this not generate universal hatred in reaction? One can already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and how that will force the US government to impose a permanent high alert emergency state... However, at this point, one cannot resist a slightly paranoid temptation: what if the people around Bush KNOW this, what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of the entire operation? What if the TRUE target of the "war on terror" is the American society itself, i.e., the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?
On March 5 2003, on "Buchanan & Press" news show on NBC, they showed on the TV screen the photo of the recently captured Khalid Shakh Mohammed, the "third man of al-Qaeda" - a mean face with moustaches, in an unspecified nightgown prison-dress, half opened and with something like bruises half-discernible (hints that he was already tortured?) -, while Pat Buchanan's fast voice was asking: "Should this man who knows all the names all the detailed plans for the future terrorist attacks on the US, be tortured, so that we get all this out of him?" The horror of it was that the photo, with its details, already suggested the answer - no wonder the response of other commentators and viewers' calls was an overwhelming "Yes!" - which makes one nostalgic of the good old days of the colonial war in Algeria when the torture practiced by the French Army was a dirty secret... Effectively, was this not a pretty close realization of what Orwell imagined in 1984, in his vision of "hate sessions," where the citizens are shown photos of the traitors and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story goes on: a day later, on another Fox TV show, a commentator claimed that one is allowed to do with this prisoner whatever, not only deprive him of sleep, but break his fingers, etc.etc., because he is "a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever." THIS is the true catastrophe: that such public statements are today possible.
We should therefore be very attentive not to fight false battles: the debates on how bad Saddam is, even on how much the war will cost, etc., are false debates. The focus should be on what effectively goes on in our societies, on what kind of society is emerging HERE as the result of the "war on terror." Instead of talking about hidden conspirative agendas, one should shift the focus onto what is going on, onto what kind of changes are taking place here and now. The ultimate result of the war will be a change in OUR political order.
The true danger can be best exemplified by the actual role of the populist Right in Europe: to introduce certain topics (the foreign threat, the necessity to limit immigration, etc.) which were then silently taken over not only by the conservative parties, but even by the de facto politics of the "Socialist" governments. Today, the need to "regulate" the status of immigrants, etc., is part of the mainstream consensus: as the story goes, le Pen did address and exploit real problems which bother people. One is almost tempted to say that, if there were no le Pen in France, he should have been invented: he is a perfect person whom one loves to hate, the hatred for whom guarantees the wide liberal "democratic pact," the pathetic identification with democratic values of tolerance and respect for diversity - however, after shouting "Horrible! How dark and uncivilized! Wholly unacceptable! A threat to our basic democratic values!", the outraged liberals proceed to act like "le Pen with a human face," to do the same thing in a more "civilized" way, along the lines of "But the racist populists are manipulating legitimate worries of ordinary people, so we do have to take some measures!"...
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
Furthermore, one is almost tempted to claim that, within the space of this reference to the Freudian logic of dreams, the Iraqi oil supplies function as the famous "umbilical cord" of the US justification(s) - almost tempted, since it would perhaps be more reasonable to claim that there are also three REAL reasons for the attack: (1) the control of the Iraqi oil reserves; (2) the urge to brutally assert and signal the unconditional US hegemony; (3) the "sincere" ideological belief that the US are bringing to other nations democracy and prosperity. And it seems as if these three "real" reasons are the "truth" of the three official reasons: (1) is the truth of the urge to liberate Iraqis; (2) is the truth of the claim the attack on Iraq will help to resolve the Middle East conflict; (3) is the truth of the claim that there is a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. - And, incidentally, opponents of the war seem to repeat the same inconsistent logic: (1) Saddam is really bad, we also want to see him toppled, but we should give inspectors more time, since inspectors are more efficient; (2) it is all really about the control of oil and American hegemony - the true rogue state which terrorizes others are the US themselves; (3) even if successful, the attack on Iraq will give a big boost to a new wave of the anti-American terrorism; (4) Saddam is a murderer and torturer, his regime a criminal catastrophe, but the attack on Iraq destined to overthrow Saddam will cost too much...
The one good argument for war is the one recently evoked by Christopher Hitchens: one should not forget that the majority of Iraqis effectively are Saddam's victims, and they would be really glad to get rid of them. He was such a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in WHATEVER form may seem a much brighter prospect to them with regard to daily survival and much lower level of fear. We are not talking here of "bringing Western democracy to Iraq," but just of getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical - do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?
One can make even a more general point here: what about pro-Castro Western Leftists who despise what Cubans themselves call "gusanos /worms/," those who emigrated - but, with all sympathy for the Cuban revolution, what right does a typical middle class Western Leftist have to despise a Cuban who decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment, but also because of poverty which goes up to simple hunger? In the same vein, I myself remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western Leftists who proudly threw in my face how for them, Yugoslavia still exists, and reproached me for betraying the unique chance of maintaining Yugoslavia - to which I always answered that I am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint Western Leftist dreams... There are effectively few things more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological (if this word has any meaning today, it should be applied here) than a tenured Western academic Leftist arrogantly dismissing (or, even worse, "understanding" in a patronizing way) an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs for Western liberal democracy and some consumerist goods... However, it is all too easy to slip from this fact to the notion that "under their skin, Iraqis are also like us, and really want the same as we do." The old story will repeat itself: America brings to the people new hope and democracy, but, instead of hailing the US army, the ungrateful people do want it, they suspect a gift in the gift, and America then reacts as a child with hurt feelings because of the ingratitude of those it selflessly helped.
The underlying presupposition is the old one: under our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all Americans, that is our true desire - so all that is needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will join us in our ideological dream... No wonder that, in February 2003, an American representative used the word "capitalist revolution" to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their revolution all around the world. No wonder they moved from "containing" the enemy to a more aggressive stance. It is the US which is now, as the defunct USSR was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. When Bush recently said "Freedom is not America's gift to other nations, it is god's gift to humanity," this apparent modesty nonetheless, in the best totalitarian fashion, conceals its opposite: yes, BUT it is nonetheless the US which perceives itself as the chosen instrument of distributing this gift to all the nations of the world!
The idea to "repeat Japan in 1945," to bring democracy to Iraq, which will then serve as model for the entire Arab world, enabling people to get rid of the corrupt regimes, immediately faces an insurmountable obstacle: what about Saudi Arabia where it is in the vital US interest that the country does NOT turn into democracy? The result of democracy in Saudi Arabia would have been either the repetition of Iran in 1953 (a populist regime with an anti-imperialist twist) or of Algeria a couple of years ago, when the "fundamentalists" WON the free elections.
There is nonetheless a grain of truth in Rumsfeld's ironic pun against the "old Europe." The French-German united stand against the US policy apropos Iraq should be read against the background of the French-German summit a month ago in which Chirac and Schroeder basically proposed a kind of dual Franco-German hegemony over the European Community. So no wonder that anti-Americanism is at its strongest in "big" European nations, especially France and Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One often hears the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second-rate (ex-)world powers, countries like United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal of "Americanization" in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe. The leveling of weight between larger and smaller Nation-States should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European post-Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of the wounded Narcissism of the European "great nations." And this great-state-nationalism is not just a feature external to the (failure of) the present opposition; it affects the very way France and Germany articulated this opposition. Instead of doing, even more actively, precisely what Americans are doing - MOBILIZING the "new European" states on their own politico-military platform, ORGANIZING the common new front -, France and Germany arrogantly acted alone.
In the recent French resistance against the war on Iraq, there definitely is a clear echo of the "old decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting, by new resolutions upon resolutions - all this reminiscent of the inactivity of the League of Nations against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call "let the inspectors do their work" clearly IS hypocritical: they are only allowed to do the work because there is a credible threat of military intervention. Not to mention the French neocolonialism in Africa (from Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French role in the Rwanda crisis and massacres)? And about the French role in the Bosnian war? Furthermore, as it was made clear a couple of months ago, is it not clear that France and Germany worry about their own hegemony in Europe?
Is the war on Iraq not the moment of truth when the "official" political distinctions are blurred? Generally, we live in a topsy-turvy world in which Republicans freely spend money, creating record budget deficits, while Democrats practice budget balance; in which Republicans, who thunder against big government and preach devolution of power to states and local communities, are in the process of creating the strongest state mechanism of control in the entire history of humanity. And the same applies to post-Communist countries. Symptomatic is here the case of Poland: the most ardent supporter of the US politics in Poland is the ex-Communist president Kwasniewski (who is even mentioned as the future secretary of NATO, after George Robertson), while the main opposition to the participation of Poland in the anti-Iraq coalition comes from the Rightist parties. Towards the end of January 2003, the Polish bishops also demanded from the government that it should add to the contract which regulates the membership of Poland in the EU a special paragraph guaranteeing that Poland will "retain the right to keep its fundamental values as they are formulated in its constitution" - by which, of course, are meant the prohibition of abortion, of euthanasia and of the same-sex marriages.
The very ex-Communist countries which are the most ardent supporters of the US "war on terror" deeply worry that their cultural identity, their very survival as nations, is threatened by the onslaught of cultural "americanization" as the price for the immersion into global capitalism - we thus witness the paradox of pro-Bushist anti-Americanism. In Slovenia, my own country, there is a similar inconsistency: the Rightist nationalist reproach the ruling Center-Left coalition that, although it is publicly for joining NATO and supporting the US anti-terrorist campaign, it is secretly sabotaging it, participating in it for opportunist reasons, not out of conviction. At the same time, however, it is reproaching the ruling coalition that it wants to undermine Slovene national identity by advocating full Slovene integration into the Westernized global capitalism and thus drowning Slovenes into contemporary Americanized pop-culture. The idea is that the ruling coalition sustains pop culture, stupid TV amusement, mindless consumption, etc., in order to turn Slovenes into an easily manipulated crowd unable of serious reflection and firm ethical posture... In short, the underlying motif is that the ruling coalition stands for the "liberal-Communist plot" : ruthless unconstrained immersion in global capitalism is perceived as the latest dark plot of ex-Communists enabling them to retain their secret hold on power.
The almost tragic misunderstanding is that the nationalists, on the one hand, unconditionally support NATO (under the US command), reproaching the ruling coalition with secretly supporting antiglobalists and anti-American pacifists, while, on the other hand, they worry about the fate of Slovene identity in the process of globalization, claiming that the ruling coalition wants to throw Slovenia into the global whirlpool, not worrying about the Slovene national identity. Ironically, the new emerging socio-ideological order these nationalist conservatives are bemoaning reads like the old New Left description of the "repressive tolerance" and capitalist freedom as the mode of appearance of unfreedom. Here, the example of Italy is crucial, with Berlusconi as prime minister: the staunchest supporter of the US AND the agent of the TV-idiotizing of the public opinion, turning politics into a media show and running a large advertisement and media company.
Where, then, do we stand with reasons pro et contra? Abstract pacifism is intellectually stupid and morally wrong - one has to stand up against a threat. Of course the fall of Saddam would have been a relief to a large majority of the Iraqi people. Even more, of course the militant Islam is a horrifying anti-feminist etc. ideology. Of course there is something of a hypocrisy in all the reasons against: the revolt should come from Iraqi people themselves; we should not impose our values on them; war is never a solution; etc. BUT, although all this is true, the attack is wrong - it is WHO DOES IT that makes it wrong. The reproach is: WHO ARE YOU TO DO THIS? It is not war or peace, it is the correct "gut feeling" that there is something terribly wrong with THIS war, that something will irretrievably change with it.
One of Jacques Lacan's outrageous statements is that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological; along the same lines, one could say that, even of most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls...), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason WHY the Nazis NEEDED anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. And the same should be said today, apropos of the US claim "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!" - even if this claim is true (and it probably is, at least to some degree), it is still false with regard to the position from which it is enunciated.
Everyone fears the catastrophic outcome of the US attack on Iraq: an ecological catastrophe of gigantic proportions, high US casualties, a terrorist attack in the West... In this way, we already accept the US standpoint - and it is easy to imagine how, if the war will be over soon, in a kind of repetition of the 1990 Gulf War, if Saddam's regime will disintegrate fast, there will be a universal sigh of relief even among many present critics of the US policy. One is even tempted to consider the hypothesis that the US are on purpose fomenting this fear of an impending catastrophe, counting on the universal relief when the catastrophe will NOT occur... This, however, is arguably the greatest true danger. That is to say, one should gather the courage to proclaim the opposite: perhaps, the bad military turn for the US would be the best thing that can happen, a sobering piece of bad news which would compel all the participants to rethink their position.
On 9/11 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on 11/9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. 11/9 announced the "happy 90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy has in principle won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global liberal world community lurks round the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are just empirical and contingent, local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over; in contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy 90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the US-Mexican border. The prospect of a new global crisis is looming: economic collapses, military and other catastrophes, emergency states...
And when politicians start to directly justify their decisions in ethical terms, one can be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up such dark threatening horizons. It is the very inflation of abstract ethical rhetorics in George W. Bush's recent public statements (of the "Does the world have the courage to act against the Evil or not?" type) which manifests the utter ETHICAL misery of the US position - the function of ethical reference is here purely mystifying, it merely serves to mask the true political stakes, which are not difficult to discern. In their recent The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. /.../ We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. /.../ This is a decisive moment. /.../ It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with it: it is effectively the future of international community which is at stake now - the new rules which will regulate it, what the new world order will be. What is going on now is the next logical step of the US dismissal of the Hague court.
The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution for human rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There must be a recognition that we are all members of one human family. We have to create new institutions. This is one of them. This is another step forward in humanity's slow march toward civilization." However, while human rights groups have hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone for international justice since top Nazis were tried by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces stiff opposition from the United States, Russia and China. The United States says the court would infringe on national sovereignty and could lead to politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even weighing legislation authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the court will be based, in the event prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy paradox here is that the US thus rejected the jurisdiction of a tribunal which was constituted with the full support (and votes) of the US themselves! Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the Hague, not be given the right to claim that, since the US reject the legality of the international jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal, the same argumentation should hold also for him? And the same goes for Croatia: the US are now exerting tremendous pressure onto the Croat government to deliver to the Hague court a couple of its generals accused of war crimes during the struggles in Bosnia - the reaction is, of course, how can they ask this of US when THEY do not recognize the legitimacy of the Hague court? Or are the US citizens effectively "more equal than others"? If one simply universalizes the underlying principles of the Bush-doctrine, does India not have a full right to attack Pakistan? It does directly support and harbor anti-Indian terror in Kashmir, and it possesses (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction. Not to mention the right of China to attack Taiwan, and so on, with unpredictable consequences...
Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "silent revolution," in the course of which the unwritten rules which determine the most elementary international logic are changing? The US scold Gerhardt Schroeder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining a stance supported by a large majority of the population, plus, according to the polls in the mid-February, around 59% of the US population itself (who oppose strike against Iraq without the UN support). In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94% of the people are opposed to allowing the US troops' presence for the war against Iraq - where is democracy here? Every old Leftist remembers Marx's reply, in The Communist Manifesto, to the critics who reproached the Communists that they aim at undermining family, property, etc.: it is the capitalist order itself whose economic dynamics is destroying the traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today than in Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the population. In the same vein, is it not that precisely those who pose today as global defenders of democracy are effectively undermining it? In a perverse rhetorical twist, when the pro-war leaders are confronted with the brutal fact that their politics is out of tune with the majority of their population, they take recourse to the commonplace wisdom that "a true leader leads, he does not follow" - and this from leaders otherwise obsessed with opinion polls...
The true dangers are the long-term ones. In what resides perhaps the greatest danger of the prospect of the American occupation of Iraq? The present regime in Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one, out of touch with the Muslim fundamentalist populism - it is obvious that Saddam only superficially flirts with the pan-Arab Muslim sentiment. As his past clearly demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving for power, and shifting alliances when it fits his purposes - first against Iran to grab their oil fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason, bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied to the US - what Saddam is not is a fundamentalist obsessed with the "big Satan," ready to blow the world apart just to get him. However, what can emerge as the result of the US occupation is precisely a truly fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with Muslim presence.
One can surmise that the US are well aware that the era of Saddam and his non-fundamentalist regime is coming to an end in Iraq, and that the attack on Iraq is probably conceived as a much more radical preemptive strike - not against Saddam, but against the main contender for Saddam's political successor, a truly fundamentalist Islamic regime. Yes in this way, the vicious cycle of the American intervention gets only more complex: the danger is that the very American intervention will contribute to the emergence of what America most fears, a large united anti-American Muslim front. It is the first case of the direct American occupation of a large and key Arab country - how could this not generate universal hatred in reaction? One can already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and how that will force the US government to impose a permanent high alert emergency state... However, at this point, one cannot resist a slightly paranoid temptation: what if the people around Bush KNOW this, what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of the entire operation? What if the TRUE target of the "war on terror" is the American society itself, i.e., the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?
On March 5 2003, on "Buchanan & Press" news show on NBC, they showed on the TV screen the photo of the recently captured Khalid Shakh Mohammed, the "third man of al-Qaeda" - a mean face with moustaches, in an unspecified nightgown prison-dress, half opened and with something like bruises half-discernible (hints that he was already tortured?) -, while Pat Buchanan's fast voice was asking: "Should this man who knows all the names all the detailed plans for the future terrorist attacks on the US, be tortured, so that we get all this out of him?" The horror of it was that the photo, with its details, already suggested the answer - no wonder the response of other commentators and viewers' calls was an overwhelming "Yes!" - which makes one nostalgic of the good old days of the colonial war in Algeria when the torture practiced by the French Army was a dirty secret... Effectively, was this not a pretty close realization of what Orwell imagined in 1984, in his vision of "hate sessions," where the citizens are shown photos of the traitors and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story goes on: a day later, on another Fox TV show, a commentator claimed that one is allowed to do with this prisoner whatever, not only deprive him of sleep, but break his fingers, etc.etc., because he is "a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever." THIS is the true catastrophe: that such public statements are today possible.
We should therefore be very attentive not to fight false battles: the debates on how bad Saddam is, even on how much the war will cost, etc., are false debates. The focus should be on what effectively goes on in our societies, on what kind of society is emerging HERE as the result of the "war on terror." Instead of talking about hidden conspirative agendas, one should shift the focus onto what is going on, onto what kind of changes are taking place here and now. The ultimate result of the war will be a change in OUR political order.
The true danger can be best exemplified by the actual role of the populist Right in Europe: to introduce certain topics (the foreign threat, the necessity to limit immigration, etc.) which were then silently taken over not only by the conservative parties, but even by the de facto politics of the "Socialist" governments. Today, the need to "regulate" the status of immigrants, etc., is part of the mainstream consensus: as the story goes, le Pen did address and exploit real problems which bother people. One is almost tempted to say that, if there were no le Pen in France, he should have been invented: he is a perfect person whom one loves to hate, the hatred for whom guarantees the wide liberal "democratic pact," the pathetic identification with democratic values of tolerance and respect for diversity - however, after shouting "Horrible! How dark and uncivilized! Wholly unacceptable! A threat to our basic democratic values!", the outraged liberals proceed to act like "le Pen with a human face," to do the same thing in a more "civilized" way, along the lines of "But the racist populists are manipulating legitimate worries of ordinary people, so we do have to take some measures!"...
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
The Iraq War: Where is the True Danger - lacan.com (Mar. 13)
Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky surveys the dangers and prospects of our early twenty-first century. Exploring challenges such as the growing gap between North and South, American exceptionalism (including under President Barack Obama), the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli assault on Gaza, and the recent financial bailouts, he also sees hope for the future and a way to move forward—in the democratic wave in Latin America and in the global solidarity movements that suggest "real progress toward freedom and justice."
Hopes and Prospects is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the primary challenges still facing the human race.
"This is a classic Chomsky work: a bonfire of myths and lies, sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky is an enduring inspiration all over the world—to millions, I suspect—for the simple reason that he is a truth-teller on an epic scale. I salute him." —John Pilger
"In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of American empire and class domination, at home and abroad, Chomsky continues a longstanding and crucial work of elucidation and activism...the writing remains unswervingly rational and principled throughout, and lends bracing impetus to the real alternatives before us." —Publisher's Weekly
"Chomsky’s commentary is razor sharp and offers a compendium of facts that make a well-supported—and undoubtedly controversial—claim of the incongruity between US actions and the democratic ideals it professes....A valuable resource for both academics and everyday concerned citizens." —ForeWord
Professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky is widely regarded to be one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy in the world. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. Among his recent books are The New York Times bestsellers Hegemony or Survival and Failed States.
This selection of Chomsky's essays and lectures comes divided into geographical areas, but the issues are global in scope and import. In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of American empire and class domination, at home and abroad, Chomsky continues a longstanding and crucial work of elucidation and activism. His latest updates elaborate upon his signature themes—the double standards applied by the centers of U.S. power, including the mainstream media and intellectual culture, and the pervasive disconnect between American policies and public opinion in what Chomsky dubs a dysfunctional democracy. But this book flags another major interest of Chomsky's, signaled in the title: global avenues of resistance, in particular the democratic and independent course being forged across Latin America (where several of these lectures were originally delivered). There are significant redundancies and polemical flourishes, but the writing remains unswervingly rational and principled throughout, and lends bracing impetus to the real alternatives before us. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Excerpt
From the chapter "Democracy and Development: Their Enemies, Their Hopes"
At this point we are reaching the second of the two issues raised at the outset: neoliberalism as an enemy of democracy. While the evidence indicates that imposed liberalization has generally been harmful to development over history, causal relations can be debated even when there are striking correlations, because of limits of understanding and the complexity of factors. Much less so in the case of neoliberalism and democracy, however. Just about every element of the neoliberal package is an attack on democracy. In the case of privatization, that is true by definition: privatization transfers enterprises from the public to the private domain. In the public domain they are under some degree of public control, at least in principle; in more democratic societies, that could be a considerable degree, and in still more democratic societies, which barely yet exist, they would be under the direct control of “stakeholders”: workers and communities. But the private domain is virtually unaccountable to the public in principle, except by regulatory mechanisms that are typically quite weak thanks to the overwhelming influence of concentrated private capital on the state. Of these measures, the most severe attack on democracy is privatization of services. With services privatized, democratic institutions may exist but they will be mostly formalities, because the most important decisions that affect people’s lives will have been removed from the public arena. The argument for privatization is supposed to be efficiency. If the argument were valid, it would pose a conflict of values: efficiency versus freedom. But it is doubtful that the question even arises.
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