The US Defeat in Iraq and the Persistence of White Supremacy****
By****
Ajamu Baraka****
** **
Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that
Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war
stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the
people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in
the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a
democratizing track? After 9/11, the idea of helping to change the context
of Arab politics and address the root causes of Arab state dysfunction and
Islamist terrorism which were identified in the 2002 Arab Human
Development Report as a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and a
deficit of womens empowerment seemed to me to be a legitimate strategic
choice. ****
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, December 21, 2011****
****
As the final contingents of U.S. troops withdraw from the Iraqi state that
the U.S. created and imposed on the Iraqi people, a familiar narrative is
re-emerging in the mainstream corporate press the 21st century version of
the white mans burden. ****
Used to complement the main propaganda theme that claimed Iraq possessed
weapons of mass destruction and had imminent plans to turn those weapons
over to terrorists who would unleash a volley of attacks on the U.S.
homeland, the white mans burden subtext asserted that the U.S. had a
moral obligation to free the Iraqi people from their backward and brutal
history. Couched in the language of neo-conservatism, the white mans
burden now included a more explicit commitment to the need to establish a
liberal democratic state in Iraq that would allow the natives to
experience all of the benefits of a Western-style democratic governmental
process and, of course, the benefits of free market capitalism. That
moral appeal helped to sell the war to the American people. ****
The idea of the Wests civilizing responsibilities was always a constant
and predominant rationalization in the new world conquest and genocidal
policies toward Indigenous peoples in this case, they needed to be
destroyed in order to save them from their heathen ways. The populating of
the Americas with enslaved Africans was also framed as a Christian
civilizing mission that gave these otherwise idle human beings something
more productive to do.
But the benevolence of the White West did not stop there; enriched with the
spoils provided by the Atlantic slave trade that created an industrial
economic base which in turn enhanced their war-making abilities, Western
powers took their civilizing mission global, building vast colonial empires
where they could demonstrate to the peoples of the world how to more
effectively use their natural resources and labor by taking those
resources and exploiting their labor. ****
Clearly one could assume that this crude, racist framework would be
discredited and have no place in the sophisticated, multi-cultural
discourses of the 21st century. Yet the very fact that many millions of
people in this country were swayed by the crude representations of Iraq as
a backward, undeveloped nation in need of the modernizing influences of the
civilized West demonstrated that in the culture and psychologies of most
people in the U.S., despite their assigned or assumed racial identity,
white supremacist assumptions and world views were deeply ingrained.
And now that the U.S. has been defeated in Iraq (and one should not be
confused by any other explanation as to why the U.S. is leaving despite
stated plans to maintain a military presence there for the next fifty
years), the narrative that is now being relied on to mask this defeat is
that the civilizing mission has run its course, with the U.S. having done
as much as it could to prepare the Iraqis for independence in the
grown-up world. Employing classic revisionist history, the architects of
the war are suggesting that this was the main reason why the U.S. went to
Iraq in the first place. Like the first time parents hand their keys to
their teenage children for their first solo drive, the U.S. must simply
hope that the Iraqis have learned enough to avoid a major accident! ****
The successful use of this narrative demonstrates that ten years, 700,000
Iraqi and 4,500 American lives later, the one casualty that did not occur
in Iraq was the death of white supremacist ideology. While the physical
retreat of the U.S. from Iraq represents a significant defeat for U.S.
imperialist aspirations and its geo-political goals in the region, the
ideological obscurantism that masked the imperialist interests of the 1
percent, who saw their opportunity to seize Iraq in the wake of the 9/11
war hysteria, was recently evoked again to provide a cover for the seizure
of Libya. Few in the US seemed to notice the irony of calls being made by
the Obama Administration and many Republicans, including New York
Congressman Peter King, to support NATOs no fly zone to protect Muslim
lives in the same week that hearings were called in Congress by the
notoriously anti-Muslim Peter King, whose agenda is to racially profile all
Muslims in the US. ****
Again, images of barbarism were conjured up as the corporate media
saturated their reports with grainy cell phone photos of a dumpster on fire
with a voice over from a Libyan woman with an American accent pleading
for outside intervention to save the Libyan people. Once again, the
American people were convinced with breathtaking ease that military
intervention was morally justified even if it meant, as Defense Secretary
Gates warned, that enforcing a no-fly zone was essentially an act of war!*
***
Some might argue that the response from at least some segments of the
American public to military action in Libya represented an authentic desire
to save lives and cannot be simply reduced to some nefarious desire to
extend or impose so-called white Western dominance. Perhaps, but the
authenticity of the concerns on the part of many Americans is not the
issue. Rather, the real issue is that people in the U.S. and the West
believe that they have the right to intervene anywhere on the planet to
remake a society or the world to correspond to their ideas. That
uncontested right based on the supposed superiority of liberal Western
civilization that has been assimilated by the collective consciousness of
the West is the central prerogative of white supremacist ideology. ****
The public slaughter of Kaddafi and the hanging of Saddam Hussein are two
sides of the same arrogant, white supremacist coin. In both cases it is the
imperialist West, using the power of the military and with the full support
of a majority of the people, that bombed cities; murdered and imprisoned
leaders and government officials; displaced populations, tortured prisoners
to death; raped women; and deliberately destroyed the populations
electrical and water supplies in order to bring to those people the
benefits of living in free societies like those of the West. And now, as
the U.S. slinks out of Iraq, we are being told that all that was done in
that country was for the good of the Iraqi people and that it is up to the
Iraqis to protect the gift of freedom that the U.S. has bestowed upon
them. ****
What is more sad than the fact that this line is being fed to the people in
the U.S. to cover their defeat (and that it is being accepted), is the
knowledge that until we undermine forever the false assumptions and
prerogatives of white supremacist ideology, more blood will be shed, more
victims tortured and imprisoned and more nations destroyed all in the
name of a monstrous lie. ****
** **
****
**
--
*The Cyberground Railroad: **Black Los Angeles' News and Views Source | *
*cybergroundrr.com, facebook.com/cybergroundrailroad, twitter.com/cybergrrr*
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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