A Mask for Pillage

by Edward W. Said

The Progressive magazine, June 2003

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

The appalling consequences of the U.S. and British intervention in Iraq are only just beginning to unfold, first with the coldly calculated destruction of its modern infrastructure, then with the looting and burning of one of the world's richest civilizations, and finally the totally cynical American attempt to engage a band of motley "exiles," plus various large corporations, in the supposed rebuilding of the country and the appropriation not only of its oil but also its destiny. In response to the dreadful scenes of looting and burning, which in the end are the occupying power's responsibility, Donald Rumsfeld managed to put himself in a class with Hulagu, who sacked and burned Baghdad in 1258 before moving on to Damascus. "Freedom is untidy," Rumsfeld said on one occasion, and "stuff happens" on another. Remorse or sorrow was nowhere in evidence.

General Jay Garner, hand-picked for the job, seems like a person straight out of the 1 980s TV series Dallas. The Pentagon's favorite exile, Ahmad Chalabi, intimates that he plans to sign a peace treaty with Israel, hardly an Iraqi idea. Bechtel has already been awarded a huge contract. This, too, in the name of the American people. The whole business smacks of nothing so much as Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

This is an almost total failure in democracy, ours as Americans, not Iraq's. We hear that 70 percent of the American people are supposed to be for all this, but nothing is more manipulative and fraudulent than polls of random numbers of Americans who are asked whether they "support our President and troops in time of war." As Byrd said in his speech, "There is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered.... A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq."

Who is going to ask questions now that General Tommy Franks sits triumphantly with his staff around one of Saddam's tables in a Baghdad palace?

I am convinced that in nearly every way, this was a rigged and unnecessary war. The Bush Administration turned Iraq and its strutting leader into a simulacrum of a formidable quasi-metaphysical threat whereas-and this bears repeating-its demoralized and basically useless armed forces were a threat to no one at all. What was formidable about Iraq was its rich culture, its complex society, its long-suffering people: These were all made invisible, the better to smash the country as if it were only a den of thieves and murderers. Either without proof or with fraudulent information, Saddam was accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction that were a direct threat to the United States 7,000 miles away. He was identical with the whole of Iraq, a desert place "out there" (to this day most Americans have no idea where Iraq is, what its history consists of, and who besides Saddam it contains) destined for the exercise of U.S. power unleashed illegally as a way of cowing the entire world in its Captain Ahab-like quest for reshaping reality and imparting democracy to everyone.

The deeply reactionary Washington "research" institutions that spawned Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, and the rest provide an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring what seems to be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious, basically illicit policy of global domination. Hence, the doctrine of military preemption, which was never voted on either by the people of this country or their half-asleep representatives.

How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered the government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed?

And as for planning and charting a strategic course for what, in effect, is by far the most lavishly endowed military establishment in history, one that is fully capable of dragging us into unending conflicts, that task is left to the various ideologically based pressure groups such as fundamentalist Christian leaders like Franklin Graham who have been unleashed with their Bibles on destitute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, and such lobbies as AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), along with its associated think tanks and research centers.

What seems so monumentally criminal is that good, useful words like "democracy" and "freedom" have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask for pillage, muscling in on territory, and the settling of scores.

The American program for the Arab world is the same as Israel's. Along with Syria, Iraq theoretically represents the only serious long-term military threat to Israel, and therefore it had to be put out of commission for decades.

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

What does it mean to liberate and democratize a country when no one asked you to do it, and when in the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time, fail miserably to preserve public law and order? The mix of resentment and relief at Saddam's cowardly disappearance that most Iraqis feel has brought with it little understanding or compassion either from the United States or from the other Arab states, who have stood by idly quarreling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad burned. What a travesty of strategic planning when you assume that "natives" will welcome your presence after you've bombed and quarantined them for thirteen years.

The truly preposterous mindset about American beneficence, and with it that patronizing Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media coverage. In a story about a seventy-year-old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural center from her house-wrecked in the U.S. raids-and is now beside herself with rage, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises her for having had "a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein," and then piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, "and this from a graduate of London University."

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

Edward W. Said is University Professor at Columbia.

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