India trying hard to catch up on the art of spin.
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From: Chan Mahanta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Assam] Some TRUTHS from the NY Times
Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 12:06:13 -0600
> Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth
>
>
>By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
>
>Published: January 5, 2007
>
>
>London
>
>Edel Rodriguez
>
>
>ONE of the pop heroes of the Iraq war was
>undoubtedly Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, the
>unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in
>his daily press conferences during the invasion,
>heroically denied even the most evident facts and
>stuck to the Iraqi line. Even with American tanks
>only a few hundred yards from his office, he
>continued to claim that the televised shots of
>tanks on the Baghdad streets were just Hollywood
>special effects.
>
>In his very performance as an excessive
>caricature, Mr. Sahhaf thereby revealed the
>hidden truth of the "normal" reporting: there
>were no refined spins in his comments, just a
>plain denial. There was something refreshingly
>liberating about his interventions, which
>displayed a striving to be liberated from the
>hold of facts and thus of the need to spin away
>their unpleasant aspects: his stance was, "Whom
>do you believe, your eyes or my words?"
>
>Furthermore, sometimes, he even struck a strange
>truth - when confronted with claims that
>Americans were in control of parts of Baghdad, he
>snapped back: "They are not in control of
>anything - they don't even control themselves!"
>
>What, exactly, do they not control? Back in 1979,
>in her essay "Dictatorship and Double Standards,"
>published in Commentary, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
>elaborated the distinction between
>"authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes. This
>concept served as the justification of the
>American policy of collaborating with right-wing
>dictators while treating Communist regimes much
>more harshly: authoritarian dictators are
>pragmatic rulers who care about their power and
>wealth and are indifferent toward ideological
>issues, even if they pay lip service to some big
>cause; in contrast, totalitarian leaders are
>selfless fanatics who believe in their ideology
>and are ready to put everything at stake for
>their ideals.
>
>Her point was that, while one can deal with
>authoritarian rulers who react rationally and
>predictably to material and military threats,
>totalitarian leaders are much more dangerous and
>have to be directly confronted.
>
>The irony is that this distinction encapsulates
>perfectly what went wrong with the United States
>occupation of Iraq: Saddam Hussein was a corrupt
>authoritarian dictator striving to keep his hold
>on power and guided by brutal pragmatic
>considerations (which led him to collaborate with
>the United States in the 1980s). The ultimate
>proof of his regime's secular nature is the fact
>that in the Iraqi elections of October 2002 - in
>which Saddam Hussein got a 100 percent
>endorsement, and thus overdid the best Stalinist
>results of 99.95 percent - the campaign song
>played again and again on all the state media was
>Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You."
>
>One outcome of the American invasion is that it
>has generated a much more uncompromising
>"fundamentalist" politico-ideological
>constellation in Iraq. This has led to a
>predominance of the pro-Iranian political forces
>there - the intervention basically delivered Iraq
>to Iranian influence. One can imagine how, if
>President Bush were to be court-martialed by a
>Stalinist judge, he would be instantly condemned
>as an "Iranian agent." The violent outbursts of
>the recent Bush politics are thus not exercises
>in power, but rather exercises in panic.
>
>Recall the old story about the factory worker
>suspected of stealing: every evening, when he was
>leaving work, the wheelbarrow he rolled in front
>of him was carefully inspected, but the guards
>could not find anything, it was always empty.
>Finally, they got the point: what the worker was
>stealing were the wheelbarrows themselves.
>
> This is the trick being attempted by those who
>claim today, "But the world is nonetheless better
>off without Saddam!" They forget to factor into
>the account the effects of the very military
>intervention against him. Yes, the world is
>better without Saddam Hussein - but is it better
>if we include into the overall picture the
>ideological and political effects of this very
>occupation?
>
>The United States as a global policeman - why
>not? The post-cold-war situation effectively
>called for some global power to fill the void.
>The problem resides elsewhere: recall the common
>perception of the United States as a new Roman
>Empire. The problem with today's America is not
>that it is a new global empire, but that it is
>not one. That is, while pretending to be an
>empire, it continues to act like a nation-state,
>ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if
>the guiding vision of recent American politics is
>a weird reversal of the well-known motto of the
>ecologists - act globally, think locally.
>
>After 9/11, the United States was given the
>opportunity to realize what kind of world it was
>part of. It might have used the opportunity - but
>it did not, instead opting to reassert its
>traditional ideological commitments: out with the
>responsibility and guilt with respect to the
>impoverished third world - we are the victims now!
>
>Apropos of the Hague tribunal, the British writer
>Timothy Garton Ash pathetically claimed: "No
>Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, Amin or Pol Pot,
>should ever again feel themselves protected from
>the reach of international law by the palace
>gates of sovereignty." One should simply take
>note of what is missing in this series of names
>which, apart from the standard couple of Hitler
>and Mussolini, contains three third world
>dictators: where is at least one name from the
>major powers who might sleep a bit uneasily?
>
> Or, closer to the standard list of the bad guys,
>why was there little talk of delivering Saddam
>Hussein or, say, Manuel Noriega to The Hague? Why
>was the only trial against Mr. Noriega for drug
>trafficking, rather than for his murderous abuses
>as a dictator? Was it because he would have
>disclosed his past ties with the C.I.A.?
>
>In a similar way, Saddam Hussein's regime was an
>abominable authoritarian state, guilty of many
>crimes, mostly toward its own people. However,
>one should note the strange but key fact that,
>when the United States representatives and the
>Iraqi prosecutors were enumerating his evil
>deeds, they systematically omitted what was
>undoubtedly his greatest crime in terms of human
>suffering and of violating international justice:
>his invasion of Iran. Why? Because the United
>States and the majority of foreign states were
>actively helping Iraq in this aggression.
>
>And now the United States is continuing, through
>other means, this greatest crime of Saddam
>Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the
>Iranian government. This is the price you have to
>pay when the struggle against the enemies is the
>struggle against the evil ghosts in your own
>closet: you don't even control yourself.
>
>Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the
>Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the
>author, most recently, of "The Parallax View."
>
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