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Al-Ahram Weekly Online
28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
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Thoughts about America
Edward Said warns against the return to a shameful episode in the US's intellectual
history
I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she
belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment
provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread,
quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional official statements
saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of the United States,
everything else about the current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of
young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too
many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name
is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks.
There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs,
so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public is likely to
draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media have run far too many "experts"
and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious
and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and culture
that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in
Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the projected attack
to "end" Iraq. There are US forces already in several countries with important Muslim
populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against Iraq continues, and
Israel prolongs its sadistic collective punishment of the Palestinian people, all with
what seems like great public approval in the United States.
While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more than what
Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to deeply resent the notion
that I must accept the picture of America as being involved in a "just war" against
something unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has
assigned us the role of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who should
be grateful to be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are different:
America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of laws
passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated native
Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as an American citizen
originally came to these shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush
and Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not provide for different levels of
Americanness, nor for approved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour,"
including things that have come to be called "un-" or "anti- American" statements or
attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech and
behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former rulers of
Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the importance of religion in America, he
is not authorised to enforce such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone
when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and
himself. The Constitution expressly separates church and state.
There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush and his compliant
Congress have suppressed or abrogated or abridged whole sections of the First,
Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments, instituted legal procedures that give
individuals no recourse either to a proper defence or a fair trial, that allow secret
searches, eavesdropping, detention without limit, and, given the treatment of the
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that allow the US executive branch to abduct
prisoners, detain them indefinitely, decide unilaterally whether or not they are
prisoners of war and whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to them -- which
is not a decision to be taken by individual countries. Moreover, as Congressman
Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) said in a magnificent speech given on 17
February, the president and his men were not authorised to declare war (Operation
Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit or reason, were not authorised to
increase military spending to over $400 billion per year, were not authorised to repeal
the Bill of Rights. Furthermore, he added -- the first such statement by a prominent,
publicly elected official -- "we did not ask that the blood of innocent people, who
perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in
Afghanistan." I strongly recommend that Rep. Kucinich's speech, which was made
with the best of American principles and values in mind, be published in full in Arabic
so that people in our part of the world can understand that America is not a monolith
for the use of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but in fact contains many voices and
currents of opinion which this government is trying to silence or make irrelevant.
The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled and
unprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has made no secret of the
fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of others in the pursuit of
what
a small circle of men and women around Bush believe are its interests. So far as the
Middle East is concerned, it does seem that since 11 September there has been
almost an Israelisation of US policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon and his associates
have cynically exploited the single-minded attention to "terrorism" by George Bush
and have used that as a cover for their continued failed policy against the
Palestinians. The point here is that Israel is not the US and, mercifully, the US is
not
Israel: thus, even though Israel commands Bush's support for the moment, Israel is a
small country whose continued survival as an ethnocentric state in the midst of an
Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on an expedient if not infinite dependence on the
US, but rather on accommodation with its environment, not the other way round. That
is why I think Sharon's policy has finally been revealed to a significant number of
Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more Israelis are taking the reserve officers'
position against serving the military occupation as a model for their approach and
resistance. This is the best thing to have emerged from the Intifada. It proves that
Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting occupation have finally brought fruit.
What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has been escalating
towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his people
identify themselves (as in the very name of the military campaign, Operation
Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny, its
external enemies with an equally absolute evil. Anyone reading the world press in the
past few weeks can ascertain that people outside the US are both mystified by and
aghast at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and
create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard
for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst of
all, the
legality of such actions. What does it mean to defeat "evil terrorism" in a world like
ours? It cannot mean eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an infinite and
strangely pointless task; nor can it mean changing the world map to suit the US,
substituting people we think are "good guys" for evil creatures like Saddam Hussein.
The radical simplicity of all this is attractive to Washington bureaucrats whose
domain is either purely theoretical or who, because they sit behind desks in the
Pentagon, tend to see the world as a distant target for the US's very real and
virtually
unopposed power. For if you live 10,000 miles away from any known evil state and
you have at your disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft carriers, and dozens of
submarines, plus a million and a half people under arms, all of them willing to serve
their country idealistically in the pursuit of what Bush and Condoleezza Rice keep
referring to as evil, the chances are that you will be willing to use all that power
sometime, somewhere, especially if the administration keeps asking for (and getting)
billions of dollars to be added to the already swollen defence budget.
>From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with few exceptions most
prominent intellectuals and commentators in this country have tolerated the Bush
programme, tolerated and in some flagrant cases, tried to go beyond it, toward more
self- righteous sophistry, more uncritical self-flattery, more specious argument. What
they will not accept is that the world we live in, the historical world of nations and
peoples, is moved and can be understood by politics, not by huge general absolutes
like good and evil, with America always on the side of good, its enemies on the side
of evil. When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to Arabs that they have to be
more self-critical, missing in anything he says is the slightest tone of self-
criticism.
Somehow, he thinks, the atrocities of 11 September entitle him to preach at others,
as if only the US had suffered such terrible losses, and as if lives lost elsewhere in
the world were not worth lamenting quite as much or drawing as large moral
conclusions from.
One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli intellectuals
concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of the equation the much greater
suffering of a dispossessed people without a state, or an army, or an air force, or a
proper leadership, that is, Palestinians whose suffering at the hands of Israel
continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort of moral blindness, this inability
to evaluate and weigh the comparative evidence of sinner and sinned against (to use
a moralistic language that I normally avoid and detest) is very much the order of the
day, and it must be the critical intellectual's job not to fall into -- indeed,
actively to
campaign against falling into -- the trap. It is not enough to say blandly that all
human
suffering is equal, then to go on basically bewailing one's own miseries: it is far
more
important to see what the strongest party does, and to question rather than justify
that. The intellectual's is a voice in opposition to and critical of great power,
which is
consistently in need of a restraining and clarifying conscience and a comparative
perspective, so that the victim will not, as is often the case, be blamed and real
power encouraged to do its will.
A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought of a
declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all the major French,
German, Italian and other continental papers but which did not appear in the US at
all, except on the Internet where few people took notice of it. This declaration took
the form of a pompous sermon about the American war against evil and terrorism
being "just" and in keeping with American values, as defined by these self-appointed
interpreters of our country. Paid for and sponsored by something called the Institute
for American Values, whose main (and financially well- endowed) aim is to propagate
ideas in favour of families, "fathering" and "mothering," and God, the declaration was
signed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan among
many others, but basically written by a conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke
Elshtain. Its main arguments about a "just" war were inspired by Professor Michael
Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with the pro-Israel lobby in this country,
and whose role is to justify everything Israel does by recourse to vaguely leftist
principles. In signing this declaration, Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism
and, like Sharon, allies himself with an interpretation (and a questionable one at
that)
of America as a righteous warrior against terror and evil, the more to make it appear
that Israel and the US are similar countries with similar aims.
Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state of its citizens
but
of all the Jewish people, while the US is most assuredly only the state of its
citizens.
Moreover, Walzer never has the courage to state boldly that in supporting Israel he is
supporting a state structured by ethno-religious principles, which (with typical
hypocrisy) he would oppose in the United States if this country were declared to be
white and Christian.
Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is really addressed to
"our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to understand that America's war is not
against Islam but against those who oppose all sorts of principles, which it would be
hard to disagree with. Who could oppose the principle that all human beings are
equal, that killing in the name of God is a bad thing, that freedom of conscience is
excellent, and that "the basic subject of society is the human person, and the
legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for human
flourishing"? In what follows, however, America turns out to be the aggrieved party
and, even though some of its mistakes in policy are acknowledged very briefly (and
without mentioning anything specific in detail), it is depicted as hewing to principles
unique to the United States, such as that all people possess inherent moral dignity
and status, that universal moral truths exist and are available to everyone, or that
civility is important where there is disagreement, and that freedom of conscience and
religion are a reflection of basic human dignity and are universally recognised. Fine.
For although the authors of this sermon say it is often the case that such great
principles are contravened, no sustained attempt is made to say where and when
those contraventions actually occur (as they do all the time), or whether they have
been more contravened than followed, or anything as concrete as that. Yet in a long
footnote, Walzer and his colleagues set forth a list of how many American "murders"
have occurred at Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the Marines in Beirut in
1983, as well as other military combatants. Somehow making a list of that kind is
worth making for these militant defenders of America, whereas the murder of Arabs
and Muslims -- including the hundreds of thousands killed with American weapons by
Israel with US support, or the hundreds of thousands killed by US- maintained
sanctions against the innocent civilian population of Iraq -- need be neither
mentioned nor tabulated. What sort of dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians by
Israel, with American complicity and even cooperation, and where is the nobility and
moral conscience of saying nothing as Palestinian children are killed, millions
besieged, and millions more kept as stateless refugees? Or for that matter, the
millions killed in Vietnam, Columbia, Turkey, and Indonesia with American support
and acquiescence?
All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by American
intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a statement of real
conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against the arrogant use of power, but
rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war declared by the US in full ironic
cooperation, it would seem, with those Islamists who have argued that "our" war is
with the West and with America. Speaking as someone with a claim on America and
the Arabs, I find this sort of hijacking rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it
pretends to the elucidation of principles and the declaration of values, it is in fact
exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in blinding readers with a patriotic
rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it overrides real politics, real history, and
real
moral issues. Despite its vulgar trafficking in great "principles and values," it does
none of that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed to cow foreign
readers into submission. I have a feeling that this document wasn't published here
for two reasons: one is that it would be so severely criticised by American readers
that it would be laughed out of court and two, that it was designed as part of a
recently announced, extremely well- funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda
as part of the war effort, and therefore intended for foreign consumption.
Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American Values?" augurs a new
and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse. For when the
intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of the world align themselves
so flagrantly with that power, pressing that power's case instead of urging restraint,
reflection, genuine communication and understanding, we are back to the bad old
days of the intellectual war against communism, which we now know brought far too
many compromises, collaborations and fabrications on the part of intellectuals and
artists who should have played an altogether different role. Subsidised and
underwritten by the government (the CIA especially, which went as far as providing
for the subvention of magazines like Encounter, underwrote scholarly research,
travel and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions), those militantly unreflective and
uncritical intellectuals and artists in the 1950s and 1960s brought to the whole notion
of intellectual honesty and complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For along with
that effort went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate critics, and
restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself, this is a shameful episode in our
history, and we must be on our guard against and resist its return.
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