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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line
22 - 28 February 2001
Issue No.522
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
Current issue | Previous issue | Site map
Reflections
An all-American dream
By Hani Shukrallah
Why are the Americans so shabby in their treatment of their "friends" in this
particular corner of the global empire? Notwithstanding the CIA's concerns about
restive "youth bulges" in the Arab world, Washington seems bent on destabilising its
Arab allies, and worse.
To what aim? It's enough to give the "friends" a positive persecution complex. The
"rogues" have been so beaten to the ground by deliberate action and by historical
circumstances they cut very comic figures when presented (whether by the US or by
themselves) as a "threat" to US/Israeli interests in the region. The "moderates," on
the other hand, have been bled dry of concessions and assurances of loyalty. Mind
you, this is not a question of lack of communication (among friends). In Camp David
and till the very eve of Sharon's election, Arafat was telling anyone who would
listen, most notably the CIA's youth-bulge-concerned Tanner, that the concessions
demanded of him would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. America's
allies have been at great pains to explain to their friends and patrons in
Washington that the Arabs' cup of humiliation has run over, and that the indignities
heaped upon the regimes and peoples of the region are calling forth the presumably
shared horror of the "Islamic threat."
None of this seems to make much of an impression, however, either on the various White
House residents and their men, or, a fortiori, on the lawmakers in Congress. Bush Jr's
oil-and-armaments cronies are already proving a
s sensitive to their Arab friends' dilemma as Clinton's arch-Zionist lot were. One
obvious reason for such callous disregard is that, deep down, the people in Washington
are convinced that the so-called Islamic threat is
more bogus than real. This, I believe, is an accurate assessment. Under the
fashionable cultural-essence disguise, today's Islamists are yesterday's Arab
nationalists, but mutated -- with all the faults (magnified) and no
ne of the attributes, ergo Saddam Hussein's reincarnation as caliph in
bombed-back-to-the-Middle-Ages Baghdad.
So the boys in Washington are lying through their teeth when they rant about the
threat of Islamic terrorism, Saddam, Gaddafi or Sudan's Al-Bashir. Nevertheless, this
does not explain the lengths to which they are willing
to go to humiliate the Arabs and embarrass their alleged pals and allies in the
region.
Observe the timing of Bush Jr's first Middle East "initiative" (Britain's Blair is
irrelevant now as ever -- whether it's "third way" Democrats or "right-wing
conspiracy" Republicans in the White House, he happily does wh
at he is told). An acknowledged war criminal has just won the premiership in Israel.
He is forming a cabinet straight out of the Arabs' worst nightmare, a grim Zionist
monolith that leaves not the slightest room for illus
ion; one great big happy Zionist family, stretching all the way from the Arabs' pet
dove, Peres (who remembers Qana anyway?), to a couple of frothing-at-the-mouth
genocidal maniacs with freakish dreams of wiping out half
of Egypt's 60 million people by bombing the High Dam. Nearly ten years after Madrid,
the peace process has been declared over and done with. There shall be no "final and
lasting" Arab-Israeli peace. Israel is to have a wa
r cabinet, and the whole region seems to be hanging over a precipice of apocalyptic
violence.
And Bush Jr goes and bombs Baghdad.
If only to underline the linkage, the allegedly "routine" bombing of the beleaguered
Arab capital is to be followed soon after by joint US-Israeli Patriot missile
exercises, also "routine."
Such breezy disregard for the stability and, at the very least, medium-term survival
prospects of America's friends in the Arab world seems, at first glance, totally
bewildering -- even more so now that the AIPAC crowd is
out of the White House, having been replaced by the Arabs' alleged friends in the oil
industry. The point, of course, is that in today's US, one does not need to be Jewish
to be a Zionist, as Edward Said has so clearly i
llustrated in his series of articles on Zionism in America. It is not that the
"Zionist lobby" has become all-powerful in America, but that Zionism, in ideology and
practice, has become the most accurate expression of Ame
rica's imperial self-image and needs in a post-Cold War, globalised and globalising
world. No other ideology and practice seems to both embody and epitomise the arrogance
of power, the arbitrary and unchecked dispensing o
f violence, the unequivocally racist contempt for the oppressed and the heartless
denial of their most fundamental rights, that appear more and more to be essential
requisites of US-led capitalist globalisation -- at so l
ittle cost, and so successfully.
Meanwhile, not a single reassuring illusion is left for the Arab "realists" to lean on.
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The US, Saddam and Sharon
Irresponsible acts
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Pounding Arab expectations
War drums herald Powell tour
In our own defence
Washington's favourite demon
15 - 21 February 2001
Innocent victims of a dirty war
1 - 7 February 2001
Playing the waiting game
18 - 24 January 2001
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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