Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first-century market capitalism, American style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.
The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.
15. An Ordinary Person’s Guide
to Empire
The original version of this essay was published in the Guardian (London), April 2, 2003.
Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. How many children in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words?
And now the bombs are falling, incinerating, and humiliating that ancient civilization.
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colorful messages in childish handwriting: “For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse.”1 A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother’s marbles.
On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an “embedded” CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. “I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty,” Private AJ said. “I wanna take revenge for 9/11.”2
To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was “embedded,” he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. “Yeah, well, that stuff’s way over my head,” he said.3
According to a New York Times / CBS News survey, 42 percent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.4 And an ABC News poll says that 55 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports Al-Qaeda.5 What percentage of America’s armed forces believes these fabrications is anybody’s guess.
It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses.
But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins, and bottled mineral water are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn’t need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.
President George W. Bush, commander in chief of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, has issued clear instructions: “Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated.”6 (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people’s bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the Supreme Commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war.
And what a war it is.
After using the “good offices” of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivaled in history, the “Allies” / “Coalition of the Willing” (better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) sent in an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don’t think so. It’s more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.
So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and aging tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmaneuver the “Allies.” Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defense. A defense which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we’re invaded/colonized/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)
Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the “Allies” are at war, the extent to which the “Allies” and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their own objectives.
When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people following the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history—Operation Decapitation—we had Geoff Hoon, British defense secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in trenches.7 We then had a flurry of coalition speculation: Was it really Saddam Hussein, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it prerecorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?
After dropping not hundreds but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed, a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! “They’re also using very old stocks . . . and those stocks are not reliable, and [their] missiles are going up and coming down.”8
If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?
When the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties, it’s denounced as “emotive” Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility toward the “Allies,” as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the “Allies” look bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the “terrible beauty” of war.9
When invading American soldiers (from the army “that’s only here to help”) are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva Convention and exposes “the Iraqi regime and the evil at its heart.”10 But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in Guantánamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation.11 When questioned about the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, US government officials don’t deny that they’re being ill-treated. They deny that they’re prisoners of war! They call them “unlawful combatants,”12 implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what’s the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan?13 Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the Special Forces at the Bagram Air Force Base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.14)
When the “Allies” bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva Convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact, Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while.15 It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as “balanced” when their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the Western media? Just because they do it better?
Western journalists “embedded” with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the front lines of war. Non-“embedded” journalists (like the BBC’s Rageh
Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by, the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people)16 are undermined even before they begin their reportage: “We have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities.”
Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as “militia” (i.e., rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as “quasi-terrorists.” Iraqi defense is “resistance” or, worse still, “pockets of resistance,” Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US government bugging the phone lines of UN Security Council delegates, reported by the London Observer, is hardheaded pragmatism.)17 Clearly for the “Allies” the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating.
And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 percent of them children.18 Without clean water, and with very little food. We’re still waiting for the legendary Shia “uprising,” for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannas on the “liberating” army. Where are the hordes? Don’t they know that television productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if the Saddam Hussein regime falls there will be dancing on the streets the world over.)
After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the “Allies” have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalizingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. (The water, we hear, is being sold.19 To revitalize the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.
As of July 2002, the delivery of $5.4 billion worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair.20 It didn’t really make the news. But now, under the loving caress of live TV, 230 tons of humanitarian aid—a minuscule fraction of what’s actually needed (call it a script prop)—arrived on a British ship, the Sir Galahad.21 Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?
Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday, said that it would take thirty-two Sir Galahads a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began.22
We oughtn’t to be surprised, though. It’s old tactics. They’ve been at it for years. Remember this moderate proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers published during the Vietnam War.
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however—if handled right—might . . . offer promise. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do “at the conference table.”23
Times haven’t changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It’s called “Winning Hearts and Minds.”
So here’s the moral math as it stands: Two hundred thousand Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf War.24 Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared “disabled” by a disease called Gulf War Syndrome, believed to be caused in part by exposure to depleted uranium.25 It hasn’t stopped the “Allies” from continuing to use depleted uranium.26
And now this talk of bringing the United Nations back into the picture.
But that old UN girl—it turns out that she just ain’t what she was cracked up to be. She’s been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she’s the world’s janitor. She’s the Filipina cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the mail-order bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She’s employed to clean other people’s shit. She’s used and abused at will.
Despite Tony Blair’s earnest submissions, and all his fawning, George Bush has made it clear that the United Nations will play no independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The United States will decide who gets those juicy “reconstruction” contracts.27 But Bush has appealed to the international community not to “politicize” the issue of humanitarian aid. On March 28, 2003, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN’s Oil for Food program, the UN Security Council voted unanimously for the resolution.28 This means that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US-led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.
Contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq, we’re told, in discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world economy. It’s funny how the interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully, and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in “reconstruction” work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75 billion.29 Contracts for “reconstruction” are already being negotiated. The news doesn’t hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us, is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US Vice President Dick Cheney (who was a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?
As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting “We don’t need your stinking wine.”30 We’ve heard about the re-baptism of french fries. Freedom fries, they’re called now.31 There’s news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods.32 The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the United States who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the Internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted. These lists are being honed and refined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the “inevitability” of the project of corporate globalization is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.
It’s become clear that the War Against Terror is not really about terror, and the War on Iraq not only about oil. It’s about a superpower’s self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In the one case it’s an IMF checkbook. In the other, the cruise missiles.
Finally, there’s the matter of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)
In the fog of war one thing’s for sure: if the Saddam Hussein regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of ext
reme provocation. Under similar circumstances (say, if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington, DC) could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox, and nerve gas? Would it?
Excuse me while I laugh.
In the fog of war we’re forced to speculate: Either Saddam Hussein is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or—he simply does not possess Weapons of Mass Destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.
So here’s Iraq—rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here’s Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here’s all of us watching CNN–BBC, BBC–CNN late into the night. Here’s all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda, and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the United States, fried potatoes). When someone says “humanitarian aid” we automatically go looking for induced starvation. “Embedded,” I have to admit, is a great find. It’s what it sounds like. And what about “arsenal of tactics”? Nice!
The End of Imagination Page 30