CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

Low Point of Powerlessness.

Sixty years ago the Jews of Europe were at the lowest point of their collective existence. Herded like cattle into trains, they were transported from the rest of Europe by n.a.z.i soldiers into death camps, where they were systematically exterminated in gas ovens. They had offered some resistance in Poland, but in most places they first lost their civil status, then they were removed from their jobs, then they were designated official enemies to be destroyed, and then they were. In every significant instance they were the most powerless of people, treated as insidious, potentially overpowering enemies by leaders and armies whose own power was far, far greater; indeed, even the idea of Jews representing a danger to the might of countries like Germany, France, and Italy was preposterous. But it was an accepted idea, since with few exceptions most of Europe turned its back on them during their slaughter. It is only one of the ironies of history that the word used most frequently to describe them in the hideous official jargon of fascism was the word "terrorists," just as Algerians and Vietnamese were later called "terrorists" by their enemies.

Every human calamity is different, so there is no point in trying to look for equivalence between one and the other. But it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and tragic collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing a.n.a.logies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion. Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes and misrule, Yasir Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined Ramallah compound is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic leader who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want to press the a.n.a.logy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s. Israel's army, air force, and navy, heavily subsidized by the United States, have been wreaking havoc on the totally defenseless civilian population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. For the past half century the Palestinians have been a dispossessed people, millions of them refugees, most of the rest under a thirty-five-year-old military occupation, at the mercy of armed settlers who systematically have been stealing their land and an army that has killed them by the thousands. Thousands more have been imprisoned, thousands have lost their livelihood, made refugees for the second or third time, all of them without civil or human rights.

And still Sharon makes the case that Israel is struggling to survive against Palestinian terrorism. Is there anything more grotesque than this claim, even as this deranged killer of Arabs sends his F-16s, his attack helicopters, and hundreds of tanks against unarmed people without any defenses at all? They are terrorists, he says, and their leader, humiliatingly imprisoned in a crumbling building with Israeli destruction all around him, is characterized as the arch-terrorist of all time. Arafat has the courage and defiance to resist, and he has his people with him on that score. Every Palestinian feels the deliberate humiliation inflicted on him as a cruelty without political or military purpose except punishment, pure and simple. What right does Israel have to do this?

The symbolism is truly awful to register and is made even more so by the knowledge that Sharon and his supporters, to say nothing of his criminal army, intend what the symbolism so starkly ill.u.s.trates. Israeli Jews are the powerful ones, Palestinians their hunted and despised Others. Luckily for Sharon, he has Shimon Peres, perhaps the greatest coward and hypocrite in world politics today, going around everywhere saying that Israel understands the difficulties of the Palestinian people, and "we" are willing to make the closures slightly less onerous. After which not only does nothing improve, but the curfews, demolitions, and killings intensify. And of course, the Israeli position is to call for ma.s.sive international humanitarian aid that, as Terje Roed-La.r.s.en correctly says, is in effect to cajole international donors into actually underwriting the Israeli occupation. Sharon must surely feel that he can do anything and not only get away with it completely but somehow even manage a campaign whose purpose is to give Israel the role of victim.

As popular protests grow worldwide, the organized Zionist counter-response has been to complain that anti-Semitism is on the rise. On September 17, 2002, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers issued a statement to the effect that an antidivestment campaign led by professors-an attempt to pressure the university into divesting itself of shares in American firms selling military equipment to Israel-was anti-Semitic. A Jewish president of the country's oldest and richest university complains of anti-Semitism! Criticism of Israeli policy is now routinely equated with anti-Semitism of the kind that brought about the Holocaust, even though in the United States there is no anti-Semitism to speak of. In the United States a group of Israeli and American academics are organizing a McCarthy-style campaign against professors who have spoken up about Israeli human rights abuses; the main purpose of the campaign is to ask students and faculty to inform against their pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and seriously curtailing academic freedom.

A further irony is that protests against Israeli brutality-most recently Arafat's humiliating isolation in Ramallah-have taken place on a ma.s.s level. Palestinians by the thousands defied curfews in Gaza and several West Bank towns in order to go out on the streets in support of their embattled leader. For their part, the Arab rulers have been silent or powerless or both together. Every one of them, including Arafat, has for years openly stated a willingness for peace with Israel; two leading Arab countries actually have treaties with it. Yet all Sharon gives in return is a kick to their collective bottoms. Arabs, he says repeatedly, only understand force, and now that we have power, we shall treat them as they deserve (and as we used to be treated).

Uri Avnery is right: Arafat is being murdered. And with him, according to Sharon, will die the aspirations of the Palestinians. This is an exercise short of complete genocide to see how far Israeli power can go in s.a.d.i.s.tic brutality without being stopped or apprehended. Today Sharon has said that in the event of a war with Iraq, which is definitely coming, he will retaliate against Iraq, thus no doubt causing Bush and Rumsfeld the nightmares they rightly deserve. Sharon's last attempt at regime change was in Lebanon during 1982. He put Bashir Gemayel in as president, then was summarily told by Gemayel that Lebanon would never be an Israeli va.s.sal, then Gemayel was a.s.sa.s.sinated, then the Sabra and Shatila ma.s.sacres took place, then after twenty b.l.o.o.d.y and ignominious years the Israelis sullenly withdrew from Lebanon.

What conclusion is one to draw from all this? That Israeli policy has been a disaster for the entire region. The more powerful it becomes, the more ruin it sows in the countries around it, to say nothing of the catastrophes it has executed against the Palestinian people, and the more hated it becomes. It is power used for evil purposes, not self-defense at all. The Zionist dream of a Jewish state being a normal state like all others has come to the vision of the leader of Palestine's indigenous people hanging on to his life by a thread, while Israeli tanks and bulldozers continue to wreck everything around him. Is this the Zionist goal for which hundreds of thousands have died? Isn't it clear what logic of resentment and violence is at work in all this, and what power will come from the powerlessness that can now only witness but will certainly develop later? Sharon is proud to have defied the entire world, not because the world is anti-Semitic but because what he does in the name of the Jewish people is so outrageous. Isn't it time for those who feel that his appalling actions do not represent them to call a halt to his behavior?

Al-Ahram, September 26October 2, 2002.

Al-Hayat, September 30, 2002.

PART THREE.

Israel, Iraq, and the United States.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE.

Israel, Iraq, and the United States.

Many parts of Lebanon were bombed heavily by Israeli warplanes on June 4, 1982. Two days later the Israeli army entered Lebanon through the country's southern border. Menachem Begin was prime minister, Ariel Sharon his minister of defense. The immediate reason for the invasion was an attempted a.s.sa.s.sination in London of the Israeli amba.s.sador, but then as now, Begin and Sharon placed the blame on the "terrorist organization" of the PLO, whose forces in South Lebanon had actually observed a cease-fire for about one full year before the invasion. A few days later, on June 13, Beirut was under Israeli military siege, even though, as the campaign began, Israeli government spokesmen had cited the Awali River, 35 kilometers north of the border, as their goal. Later, it was to emerge without equivocation that Sharon was trying to kill Yasir Arafat, by bombing everything around the defiant Palestinian leader. Accompanying the siege was a blockade of humanitarian aid, the cutting off of water and electricity, and a sustained aerial bombing campaign that destroyed hundreds of Beirut buildings and, by the end of the siege in late August, had killed eighteen thousand Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians.

Lebanon had been racked with a terrible civil war since the spring of 1975, and although Israel had only once sent its army into Lebanon before 1982, it had been sought out as an ally by the Christian right-wing militias early on. With a stronghold in East Beirut, these militias cooperated with Sharon's forces right through the siege, which ended after a horrendous day of indiscriminate bombing on August 12 and of course the ma.s.sacres of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon's main ally was Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Phalange Party, who was elected Lebanon's president by the parliament on August 23. Gemayel hated the Palestinians who had unwisely entered the civil war on the side of the National Movement, a loose coalition of left-wing and Arab nationalist parties that included Amal, a forerunner of today's Hizbollah Shi'ite movement that was to play the major role in driving out the Israelis in May 2000. Faced with the prospect of direct Israeli va.s.salage after Sharon's army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred. He was a.s.sa.s.sinated on September 14. Two days later the camp ma.s.sacres began inside a security cordon provided by the Israeli army so that Bashir's vengeful fellow-Christian extremists could do their hideous work unopposed and undistracted.

Under UN and of course U.S. supervision, French troops had entered Beirut on August 21. They were to be joined by U.S. and other European forces a little later, although PLO fighters began their evacuation from Lebanon on August 21. By the first of September, that evacuation was over, and Arafat plus a small band of advisers and soldiers were lodged in Tunis. Meanwhile the Lebanese civil war continued until about 1990, when a concordat was fashioned together in Taif, more or less restoring the old confessional system, which remains in place today. In mid-1994 Arafat-still head of the PLO-and some of those same advisers and soldiers were able to enter Gaza as part of the so-called Oslo agreements. Earlier this year Sharon was quoted as regretting his failure to kill Arafat in Beirut. Not for want of trying, though, since dozens of hiding places and headquarters were smashed into rubble with great loss of life. Nineteen eighty-two hardened Arabs, I think, to the notion that not only would Israel use advanced technology (planes, missiles, tanks, and helicopters) to attack civilians indiscriminately, but that neither the United States nor the other Arabs would do anything at all to stop the practice, even if meant targeting leaders and capital cities. (For more on this episode, see Rashid Khalidi, Under Siege, New York, 1986; Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, London, 1990; more specifically on the Lebanese civil war, Jonathan Randal, Going All the Way, New York, 1983.) Thus ended the first full-scale contemporary attempt at military regime change by one sovereign country against another in the Middle East. I bring it up as a messy backdrop to what is occurring now. Sharon is now Israel's prime minister; his armies and propaganda machine are once again surrounding and dehumanizing Arafat and the Palestinians as "terrorists." It is worth recalling that the word terrorist began to be employed systematically by Israel to describe any Palestinian act of resistance beginning in the mid-1970s. That has been the rule ever since, especially during the first intifada of 198793, eliminating the distinction between resistance and pure terror and effectively depoliticizing the reasons for armed struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s Ariel Sharon earned his spurs, so to speak, by heading the infamous Unit 101, which killed Arab civilians and razed their houses with the approval of Ben-Gurion. He was in charge of the pacification of Gaza in 197071. None of this, including the 1982 campaign, ever resulted in getting rid of the Palestinian people, or in changing the map or the regime enough by military means to ensure a total Israeli victory.

The main difference between 1982 and 2002 is that the Palestinians now being victimized and besieged are in Palestinian territories that were occupied in 1967, and they have remained there despite the ravages of the occupation and the destruction of the economy and the whole civilian infrastructure of collective life. The main similarity is, of course, the disproportional means used to do it, for example the hundreds of tanks and bulldozers used to enter towns and villages like Jenin or refugee camps like Jenin's and Deheisheh, to kill, vandalize, prevent ambulances and first-aid workers from helping, cut off water and electricity, and so on. All with the support of the United States, whose president actually went so far as to call Sharon a man of peace during the worst rampages of March and April 2002. It is significant of how Sharon's intention went far beyond "rooting out terror" that his soldiers destroyed every computer and then carried off the files and hard drives from the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Ministries of Education, of Finance, and of Health, cultural centers, vandalizing officers and libraries, all as a way of reducing Palestinian collective life to a premodern level.

I don't want to rehea.r.s.e my criticisms of Arafat's tactics or the failures of his deplorable regime during the Oslo negotiations and thereafter. I have done so at length here and elsewhere. Besides, as I write the man is quite literally hanging on to life by his teeth; his crumbling quarters in Ramallah are also still besieged, while Sharon does everything possible to injure him short of actually having him killed. What concerns me is the whole idea of regime change as an attractive prospect for individuals, ideologies, and inst.i.tutions that are asymmetrically more powerful than their adversaries. What kind of thinking makes it relatively easy to conceive of great military power as licensing political and social change on a scale not imagined before, and doing so with little concern for the damage on a vast scale that such change necessarily entails? And how do the prospects of not incurring much risk of casualties for one's own side stimulate more and still more fantasies about surgical strikes, clean war, high-technology battlefields, changing the entire map, creating democracy, and the like, all of it giving rise to ideas of omnipotence, wiping the slate clean, and being in ultimate control of what matters to "our" side?

During the current American campaign for regime change in Iraq, it is the people of Iraq, the vast majority of whom have paid a terrible price in poverty, malnutrition, and illness as a result of ten years of sanctions, who have dropped out of sight. This is completely in keeping with U.S. Middle East policy, built as it is on two mighty pillars, the security of Israel and plentiful supplies of inexpensive oil. The complex mosaic of traditions, religions, cultures, ethnicities, and histories that make up the Arab world-especially in Iraq-despite the existence of nation-states with sullenly despotic rulers, is lost to U.S. and Israeli strategic planners. With a five-thousand-year-old history, Iraq is mainly now thought of either as a "threat" to its neighbors, which, in its currently weakened and besieged condition, is rank nonsense, or as a "threat" to the freedom and security of the United States, which is more nonsense. I am not even going to bother here to add my condemnations of Saddam Hussein as a dreadful person: I shall take it for granted that he certainly deserves by almost every standard to be ousted and punished. Worst of all, he is a threat to his own people.

Yet since the period before the first Gulf War, the image of Iraq as in fact a large, prosperous, and diverse Arab country has disappeared; the image that has circulated both in media and policy discourse is of a desert land peopled by brutal gangs headed by Saddam. That Iraq's debas.e.m.e.nt now has, for example, nearly ruined the Arab book-publishing industry, given that Iraq provided the largest number of readers in the Arab world; that it was one of the few Arab countries with a large, educated, and competent professional middle cla.s.s; that it has oil, water, and fertile land; that it has always been the cultural center of the Arab world (the Abbasid Empire, with its great literature, philosophy, architecture, science, and medicine was an Iraqi contribution that is still the basis for Arab culture); that the bleeding wound of Iraqi suffering has, like the Palestinian calvary, been a source of continuing sorrow for Arabs and Muslims alike-all this is literally never mentioned. Its vast oil reserves, however, are, and as the argument goes, if "we" took them away from Saddam and got hold of them, we wouldn't be so dependent on Saudi oil. That too is rarely cited as a factor in the various debates racking the U.S. Congress and the media. But it is worth mentioning that second to Saudi Arabia, Iraq has the largest oil reserves on earth, and the roughly $1.1 trillion worth of oil-much of it already committed by Saddam to Russia, France, and a few other countries-that have been available to Iraq are a crucial aim of U.S. strategy, something that the Iraqi National Congress has used as a trump card with non-U.S. oil consumers. (For more details on all this, see Michael Klare, "Oiling the Wheels of War," The Nation, October 7.) A good deal of the bargaining between Putin and Bush concerns how much of a share of that oil U.S. companies are willing to promise Russia. It is eerily reminiscent of the $3 billion offered by Bush Senior to Russia. Both Bushes are oil businessmen, after all, and they care more about that sort of calculation than they do about the delicate points of Middle Eastern politics, like rewrecking Iraq's civilian infrastructure.

Thus the first step in the dehumanization of the hated Other is to reduce his existence to a few insistently repeated simple phrases, images, and concepts. This makes it much easier to bomb the enemy without qualm. After September 11, this has been quite easy for Israel and the United States to do with respectively the Palestinians and the Iraqis as people. The important thing to note is that by an overwhelming preponderance the same policy and the same severe one-, two-, or three-stage plan is put forward princ.i.p.ally by the same Americans and Israelis. In the United States, as Jason Vest has written in The Nation (September 2/9), men from the very right-wing Jewish Inst.i.tute for National Security (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP) populate Pentagon and State Department committees, including the one run by Richard Perle (appointed by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld). Israeli and American security are equated, and JINSA spends the "bulk of its budget taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals to Israel." When they come back, they write op-eds and appear on TV hawking the Likud line. Time magazine ran a piece on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, many of whose members are drawn from JINSA and CSP, in its August 23 issue ent.i.tled "Inside the Secret War Council."

For his part, Sharon has numbingly repeated that his campaign against Palestinian terrorism is identical with the American war on terrorism generally, Usama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in particular. And they, he claims, are in turn part of the same terrorist international that includes many Muslims all over Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, even if Bush's axis of evil seems for the moment to be concentrated on Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. There are now 132 countries with some sort of American military presence, all of it linked to the war on terror, which remains undefined and floating so as to whip up more patriotic frenzy and fear and support for military action on the domestic front, where things go from bad to worse. Every major West Bank and Gaza area is occupied by Israeli troops who routinely kill and/or detain Palestinians on the grounds that they are "suspected" terrorists and militants; similarly, houses and shops are often demolished with the excuse that they shelter bomb factories, terrorist cells, and militant meeting places. No proof is given, none asked for by reporters who accept the unilateral Israeli designation without a murmur.

An immense carpet of mystification and abstraction has therefore been laid down all over the Arab world by this effort at systematic dehumanization. What the eye and ear perceive are terror, fanaticism, violence, hatred of freedom, insecurity, and the ultimate, weapons of ma.s.s destruction (WMD), which are to be found not where we know they are and are never looked for (in Israel, Pakistan, India, and obviously the United States among others) but in the hypothetical s.p.a.ces of the terrorist ranks, Saddam's hands, a fanatical gang, and so on. A constant figure in the carpet is that Arabs hate Israel and Jews for no other reason except that they hate America, too. Potentially Iraq is the most fearsome enemy of Israel because of that country's economic and human resources; Palestinians are formidable because they stand in the way of complete Israeli hegemony and land occupation. Right-wing Israelis like Sharon who represent the Greater Israel ideology claiming all of historical Palestine as a Jewish homeland have been especially successful at making their view of the region the dominant one among U.S. supporters of Israel. Uzi Landau, Israeli internal security minister (and member of the Likud Party), commented on U.S. TV this summer that all this talk of "occupation" was nonsense. We are a people coming home. He was not even quizzed about this extraordinary concept by Mort Zuckerman, host of the program, also owner of U.S. News & World Report and president of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. But Israeli journalist Alex Fishman, in Yediot Aharonot of September 6, describes the "revolutionary ideas" of Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld (who now also refers to "so-called occupied territories"), d.i.c.k Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle (who commissioned the notorious Rand study designating Saudi Arabia as the enemy and Egypt as the prize for America in the Arab world) as being terrifyingly hawkish because they advocate regime change in every Arab country. Fishman quotes Sharon as saying that this group, many of them members of JINSA and CSP and connected to the AIPAC affiliate the Washington Inst.i.tute of Near East Affairs, dominates Bush's thinking (if that's the right word for it); he says, "next to our American friends Effi Eitam [one of the Israeli cabinet's most remorseless hard-liners] is a total dove."

The other, scarier side of this is the unchallenged proposition that if "we" don't preempt terrorism (or any other potential enemy), we will be destroyed. This premise is now the core of U.S. security strategy that is regularly drummed out in interviews and talk shows by Rice, Rumsfeld, and Bush himself. The formal statement of this view appeared a short time ago in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," an official paper prepared as an overall manifesto for the administration's new, postcold war foreign policy. The working presumption is that we live in an exceptionally dangerous world with a network of enemies that does in fact exist, that it has factories, offices, and endless numbers of members, and that its entire existence is given up to destroying "us," unless we get them first. This is what frames and gives legitimacy to the wars on terrorism and on Iraq, for which the Congress and the UN are now being asked to give endors.e.m.e.nt.

Fanatical individuals and groups do exist, of course, and many of them are generally in favor of somehow harming either Israel or the United States. On the other hand, Israel and the United States are widely perceived in the Islamic and Arab worlds first of having created the so-called jihadi extremists of whom Bin Laden is the most famous, and second of blithely overriding international law and UN resolutions in the pursuit of their own hostile and destructive policies in those worlds. David Hirst writes in a Guardian column datelined Cairo that even Arabs who oppose their own despotic regimes "will see it [the U.S. attack on Iraq] as an act of aggression aimed not just at Iraq, but at the whole Arab world; and what will make it supremely intolerable is that it will be done on behalf of Israel, whose acquisition of a large a.r.s.enal of weapons of ma.s.s destruction seems to be as permissible as theirs is an abomination" (September 6).

I am also saying that there is a specific Palestinian narrative and, at least since the mid-1980s, a formal willingness to make peace with Israel that is quite contrary to the more recent terrorist threat represented by al-Qaeda or the spurious threat supposedly embodied by Saddam Hussein, who is a terrible man, of course, but is scarcely able to wage intercontinental war; only occasionally is it admitted by the administration that he might be a threat to Israel, but that seems to be one of his grievous sins. None of his neighbors perceives him as a threat. The Palestinians and Iraq get mixed up in this scarcely perceptible way so as to const.i.tute a menace that the media reinforces time and time again. Most stories about the Palestinians that appear in genteel and influential ma.s.s-circulation publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine show Palestinians as bomb-makers, collaborators, and suicide bombers, and only that. Neither of these publications has published anything from the Arab viewpoint since 9/11. Nothing at all.

So that when an administration flack like Dennis Ross (in charge of Clinton's side of the Oslo negotiations, but both before and after his stint in that job a member of an Israeli lobby affiliate) keeps saying that the Palestinians turned down a generous Israeli offer at Camp David, he is flagrantly distorting the facts, which as several authoritative sources have shown were that Israel conceded noncontiguous Palestinian areas with Israeli security posts and settlements surrounding them all and with no common border between Palestine and any Arab state (e.g., Egypt in the south, Jordan in the east). Why words like generous and offer should apply to territory illegally held by an occupying power in contravention of international law and UN resolutions, no one has bothered to ask. But given the power of the media to repeat, re-repeat, and underline simple a.s.sertions, plus the untiring efforts of the Israeli lobby to repeat the same idea-Dennis Ross himself has been singularly obdurate in his insistence on this falsehood-it is now locked into place that the Palestinians chose "terror instead of peace." Hamas and Islamic Jihad are seen not as (a perhaps misguided) part of the Palestinian struggle to be rid of Israeli military occupation but as part of the general Palestinian desire to terrorize, threaten, and be a menace. Like Iraq.

In any event, with the U.S. administration's newest and rather improbable claim that secular Iraq has been giving haven and training to the madly theocratic al-Qaeda, the case against Saddam seems to have been closed. The prevailing (but by no means uncontested) government consensus is that since UN inspectors cannot ascertain what he has of WMD, what he has hidden, and what he might still do, he should be attacked and removed. The whole point of going to the UN for authorization, from the U.S. point of view, is to get a resolution so stiff and so punitive that no matter whether or not Saddam Hussein complies, he will be so incriminated with having violated "international law" that his mere existence will warrant military regime change. In late September, on the other hand, in a Security Council resolution pa.s.sed unanimously (with U.S. abstention), Israel was enjoined to end its siege of Arafat's Ramallah compound and to withdraw from Palestinian territory illegally occupied since March (for which Israel's excuse has been "self-defense"). Israel has refused to comply, and the underlying U.S. rationale for the United States not doing much to enforce even its own stated position is that "we" understand that Israel must defend its citizens. Why the UN is to be sought after in one instance, ignored in another is one of those inconsistencies that the United States simply indulges in.

A small group of unexamined and self-invented phrases such as "antic.i.p.atory preemption" and "preventive self-defense" are bandied about by Donald Rumsfeld and his colleagues to persuade the public that the preparations for war against Iraq or any other state in need of "regime change" (or in the other somewhat rarer euphemism, "constructive destruction") are b.u.t.tressed by the notion of self-defense. The public is kept on tenterhooks by repeated red or orange alerts, people are encouraged to inform law enforcement authorities of "suspicious" behavior, and thousands of Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians have been detained and in some cases arrested on suspicion. All of this is carried out at the president's behest as a facet of patriotism and love of America. I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country (in U.S. political discourse, love of Israel is also a current phrase), but it seems to mean unquestioning blind loyalty to the powers that be, whose secrecy, evasiveness, and willful refusal to engage with an alert public, which for the time being doesn't seem to be awakened into coherent or systematic responsiveness, has concealed the ugliness and destructiveness of the whole Iraq and Middle East policy of the Bush administration.

So powerful is the United States in comparison with most other major countries combined that it can't really be constrained or compelled to obey any international system of conduct, not even one its secretary of state may wish to. Along with the abstractness of whether "we" should go to war against Iraq seven thousand miles away, discussion of foreign policy denudes other people of any thick or real human ident.i.ty; Iraq and Afghanistan, seen from the bombsight of a smart missile or on television, are at best chessboards that "we" decide to enter, destroy, reconstruct, or not, at will. The word terrorism, as well as the war on it, serves nicely to further this sentiment, since in comparison with many Europeans, the great majority of Americans have had no contact or lived experience with the Muslim lands and peoples and therefore feel no sense of the fabric of life that a sustained bombing campaign (as in Afghanistan) would tear to shreds. And seen as it is, like an emanation from nowhere except from well-financed madrasas on the basis of a "decision" by people who hate our freedoms and who are jealous of our democracy, terrorism engages polemicists in the most extravagant, if unsituated and nonpolitical, debates. History and politics have disappeared, all because memory, truth, and actual human existence have effectively been downgraded. You cannot speak about Palestinian suffering or Arab frustration because Israel's presence in the United States prevents it. At a fervently pro-Israel demonstration in May, Paul Wolfowitz mentioned Palestinian suffering in pa.s.sing, but he was loudly booed and never could refer to it again.

Moreover, a coherent human rights or free trade policy that consistently stuck to the endlessly underlined virtues of human rights, democracy, and free economies that we are const.i.tutively believed to stand for would likely be undermined domestically by special interest groups (as witness the influence of the ethnic lobbies, the steel and defense industries, the oil cartel, the farming industry, retired people, and the gun lobby, to mention only a few). Every one of the 435 congressional districts represented in Washington, for instance, has a defense or defense-related industry in it; so as Secretary of State James Baker said just before the first Gulf War, the real issue in that war against Iraq was "jobs." When it comes to foreign affairs, it is worth remembering that only something like 25 or 30 percent (compare that with the 15 percent of Americans who have actually traveled abroad) of members of Congress even have pa.s.sports, and what they say or think has less to do with history, philosophy, or ideals than with who influences the member's campaign, sends money, and so on. Two inc.u.mbent House members, Earl Hilliard of Alabama and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, supportive of the Palestinian right to self-determination and critical of Israel, were recently defeated by relatively obscure candidates who were well financed by what was openly cited as New York (i.e., Jewish) money from outside their states. The defeated pair were berated by the press as extremist and unpatriotic.

As far as U.S. Middle East policy is concerned, the Israeli lobby has no peer and has turned the legislative branch of the U.S. government into what former senator Jim Abourezk once called Israeli-occupied territory. No comparable Arab lobby even exists, much less functions effectively. As a case in point, the Senate will periodically issue forth unsolicited resolutions sent to the president that stress, underline, and reiterate American support for Israel. There was such a resolution in May 2002, just at the time when Israeli forces were occupying and in effect destroying all the major West Bank towns. One of the drawbacks of this wall-to-wall endors.e.m.e.nt of Israel's most extreme policies is that in the long run it is simply bad for Israel's future as a Middle East country. Tony Judt has well argued that case, suggesting that Israel's dead-end ideas about staying on in Palestinian land will lead nowhere and simply put off the inevitable withdrawal.

The whole theme of the war against terrorism has permitted Israel and its supporters to commit war crimes against the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, 3.4 million people, who have become (as the going phrase has it) noncombatant collateral damage. Terje Roed-La.r.s.en, who is the UN's special administrator for the Occupied Territories, has just issued a report charging Israel with inducing a humanitarian catastrophe: unemployment has reached 65 percent, 50 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, and the economy, to say nothing of people's lives, has been shattered. In comparison with this, Israeli suffering and insecurity are considerably less: there aren't Palestinian tanks occupying any part of Israel, or even challenging Israeli settlements. During the past two weeks Israel has killed seventy-five Palestinians, many of them children; it has demolished houses, deported people, razed valuable agricultural land, kept everyone indoors under eighty-hour curfews at a stretch, not permitted civilians through roadblocks or allowed ambulances and medical aid through, and as usual cut off water and electricity. Schools and universities simply cannot function. While these are daily occurrences that, like the occupation itself and the dozens of UN Security Council resolutions, have been in effect for at least thirty-five years, they are mentioned in the U.S. media only occasionally, as endnotes for long articles about Israeli government debates or the disastrous suicide bombings that have occurred. The tiny phrase "suspected of terrorism" is both the justification and the epitaph for whomever Sharon chooses to have killed. The United States doesn't object except in the mildest terms-for example, it says, "This is not helpful"-but this does little to deter the next brace of killings.

We are now closer to the heart of the matter. Because of Israeli interests in this country, U.S. Middle East policy is therefore Israelo-centric. A post-9/11 chilling conjuncture has occurred in which the Christian right, the Israeli lobby, and the Bush administration's semireligious belligerency is theoretically rationalized by neoconservative hawks whose view of the Middle East is committed to the destruction of Israel's enemies, which is sometimes given the euphemistic label of redrawing the map by bringing regime change and "democracy" to the Arab countries that most threaten Israel. (See Ibrahim Warde, "The Dynamics of World Disorder: Which G.o.d Is on Whose Side?" Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2002, and Ken Silverstein and Michael Scherer, "Born-Again Zionists," Mother Jones, October 2002.) Sharon's campaign for Palestinian reform is simply the other side of his effort to destroy the Palestinians politically, his lifelong ambition. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, even Jordan have been variously threatened, even though, dreadful regimes though they may be, they were protected and supported by the United States since World War II, as indeed was Iraq.

In fact, it seems obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Arab world that its parlous state is likely to get a whole lot worse once the United States begins its a.s.sault on Iraq. Supporters of the administration's policy occasionally say vague things like how exciting it will be when we bring democracy to Iraq and the other Arab states, without much consideration for what exactly, in terms of lived experience, that will mean for the people who actually live there, especially after B-52 strikes tear their land and homes apart relentlessly. I can't imagine that there is a single Arab or Iraqi who would not like to see Saddam Hussein removed. All the indications are that U.S./Israeli military action has made things a lot worse on a daily basis for ordinary people, but this is nothing in comparison with the terrible anxiety, psychological distortions, and political malformations imposed on their societies.

Today neither the expatriate Iraqi opposition that has been intermittently courted by at least two U.S. administrations nor the various U.S. generals such as Tommy Franks has much credibility as a postwar ruler of Iraq. Nor does there seem to have been much thought given to what Iraq will need once the regime is changed, once the internal actors get moving again, once even the Ba'ath is detoxified. It may be the case that not even the Iraqi army will lift a finger in battle on behalf of Saddam. Interestingly, though, in a recent congressional hearing three former generals from the U.S. Central Command have expressed serious and, I would say, crippling reservations about the hazards of this whole adventure as it is being planned militarily. But even those doubts do not sufficiently address the country's seething internal factionalism and ethnoreligious dynamic, particularly after thirty debilitating years under the Ba'ath Party, UN sanctions, and two major wars (three if and when the United States attacks). No one in the United States, no one at all, has any real idea of what might happen in Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt if a major military intervention took place. It is enough to know, and then to shudder, that Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis are the administration's two major expert advisers. Both are virulently and ideologically anti-Arab as well as discredited by the majority of their colleagues in the field. Lewis has never lived in the Arab world, and what he has to say about it is reactionary rubbish; Ajami is from South Lebanon, a man who was once a progressive supporter of the Palestinian struggle who has now converted to the far right and has espoused Zionism and American imperialism without reservation.

September 11 might have provided a period of national reflection and the pondering of U.S. foreign policy after the shock of that unconscionable atrocity. Such terrorism as that most certainly needs to be confronted and forcefully dealt with, but in my opinion it is always the aftermath of a forceful response that has to be considered first, not just the immediate, reflexive, and violent response. No one would argue today, even after the rout of the Taliban, that Afghanistan is now a much better and more secure place from the standpoint of the country's still-suffering citizens. Nation-building is clearly not the United States' priority there since other wars in different places draw attention away from the last battlefield. Besides, what does it mean for Americans to build a nation with a culture and history as different from theirs as Iraq's? Both the Arab world and the United States are far more complex and dynamic places than the plat.i.tudes of war and the resonant phrases about reconstruction would allow. That is obvious in post-U.S. attacks on Afghanistan.

To make matters more complicated, there are dissenting voices of considerable weight in Arab culture today, and there are movements of reform across a wide front. The same is true of the United States where, to judge from my recent experiences lecturing at various campuses, most citizens are anxious about the war, anxious to know more, and above all, anxious not to go to war with such messianic bellicosity and vague aims in mind. Meanwhile, as The Nation put it in its last editorial, the country marches toward war as if in a trance, while, with an increasing number of exceptions, Congress has simply abdicated its role of representing the people's interest. As someone who has lived within the two cultures all my life, it is appalling that the "clash of civilizations," that reductive and vulgar notion so much in vogue now, has taken over thought and action. What we need to put in place is a universalist framework for comprehending and dealing with Saddam Hussein as well as Sharon and the rulers of Myanmar, Syria, Turkey, and a whole host of those countries where depredations are endured without sufficient resistance. Demolition of houses, torture, the denial of a right to education are to be opposed wherever they occur. I know no other way of re-creating or restoring the framework but through education and the fostering of open discussion, exchange, and intellectual honesty that will have no truck with concealed special pleading or the jargons of war, religious extremism, and preemptive "defense." But that, alas, takes a long time and, to judge from the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, its little partner, wins no votes. We must do everything in our power to provoke discussion and ask embarra.s.sing questions, thereby slowing down and finally stopping the recourse to war that has now become a theory and not just a practice.

Al-Ahram, October 1016, 2002.

Al-Hayat, October 14, 15, 2002.

London Review of Books, October 17, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.

Europe Versus America.

Although I have visited England dozens of times, I have never spent more than one or two weeks there at a single stretch. This year, for the first time, I am in residence for almost two months at Cambridge University, where I am the guest of a college and giving a series of lectures on humanism at the university.

The first thing to be said is that life here is far less stressed and hectic than it is in New York, at my university, Columbia. Perhaps this slightly relaxed pace is due in part to the fact that Great Britain is no longer a world power, but also to the salutary idea that the ancient universities here are places of reflection and study rather than economic centers for producing experts and technocrats who will serve the corporations and the state. So the postimperial setting is a welcome environment for me, especially since the United States is now in the middle of a war fever that is absolutely repellent as well as overwhelming. If you sit in Washington and have some connection to the country's power elites, the rest of the world is spread out before you like a map, inviting intervention anywhere and at any time. The tone in Europe is not only more moderate and thoughtful: it is also less abstract, more human, more complex and subtle. Certainly Europe generally and Britain in particular have a much larger and more demographically significant Muslim population, whose views are part of the debate about war in the Middle East and against terrorism. So discussion of the upcoming war against Iraq tends to reflect their opinions and their reservations a great deal more than in America, where Muslims and Arabs are already considered to be on the "other side," whatever that may mean. And being on the other side means no less than supporting Saddam Hussein and being "un-American." Both of these ideas are abhorrent to Arab and Muslim Americans, but the idea that to be an Arab or Muslim means to blindly support Saddam and al-Qaeda persists nonetheless. (Incidentally, I know no other country where the adjective un is used with the nationality as a way of designating the common enemy. No one says un-Spanish or un-Chinese: these are uniquely American confections that claim to prove that we all "love" our country. How can one actually "love" something so abstract and imponderable as a country anyway?) The second major difference I have noticed between America and Europe is that religion and ideology play a far greater role in the former than in the latter. A recent poll taken in the United States reveals that 86 percent of the American population believes that G.o.d loves them. There's been a lot of ranting and complaining about fanatical Islam and violent jihadists, who are thought to be a universal scourge. Of course they are, as are any fanatics who claim to do G.o.d's will and to fight his battles in his name. But what is most odd is the vast number of Christian fanatics in the United States, who form the core of George W. Bush's support and at 60 million strong represent the single most powerful voting bloc in U.S. history. Whereas church attendance is down dramatically in England, it has never been higher in the United States, whose strange fundamentalist Christian sects are, in my opinion, a menace to the world and furnish Bush's government with its rationale for punishing evil while righteously condemning whole populations to submission and poverty.

It is the coincidence between the Christian right and the so-called neo-conservatives in America that fuels the drive toward unilateralism, bullying, and a sense of divine mission. The neoconservative movement began in the 1970s as an anticommunist formation whose ideology was undying enmity to communism, and American supremacy. The phrase "American values," now so casually trotted out as a phrase to hector the world, was invented then by people like Irving Kristol, Norman Podh.o.r.etz, Midge Decter, and others who had once been Marxists and had converted completely (and religiously) to the other side. For all of them the unquestioning defense of Israel as a bulwark of Western democracy and civilization against Islam and communism was a central article of faith. Many though not all the major neocons (as they are called) are Jewish, but under the Bush presidency they have welcomed the extra support of the Christian right, which, while it is rabidly pro-Israel, is also deeply anti-Semitic. (These Christians-many of them Southern Baptists-believe that all the Jews of the world must gather in Israel so that the Messiah can come again; those Jews who convert to Christianity will be saved, the rest will be doomed to eternal perdition.) It is the next generation of neoconservatives, such as Richard Perle, d.i.c.k Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld, who are behind the push to go to war against Iraq, a cause from which I very much doubt that Bush can ever be deterred. Colin Powell is too cautious a figure, too interested in saving his career, too little a man of principle, to represent much of a threat to this group, which is supported by the editorial pages of the Washington Post and dozens of columnists and media pundits on CNN, CBS, and NBC, as well as the national weeklies, who repeat the same cliches about the need to spread American democracy and fight the good fight, no matter how many wars have to be fought all over the world.

There is no trace of this sort of thing in Europe that I can detect. Nor is there that lethal combination of money and power on a vast scale that can control elections and national policy at will. Remember that George W. Bush spent over $200 million to get himself elected two years ago, and even Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York spent $60 million for his election: this scarcely seems like the democracy to which other nations might aspire, much less emulate. But it is accepted uncritically by what seems to be an enormous majority of Americans, who equate all this with freedom and democracy, despite its obvious drawbacks. More than any other country today, the United States is controlled at a distance from most citizens; the great corporations and lobbying groups do their will with "the people's" sovereignty, leaving little opportunity for real dissent or political change. Democrats and Republicans, for example, voted to give Bush a blank check for war with such enthusiasm and unquestioning loyalty as to make one doubt that there was any thought in the decision. The ideological position common to nearly everyone in the system is that America is best, its ideals perfect, its history spotless, its actions and society at the highest levels of human achievement and greatness. To argue with that-if that is at all possible-is to be "un-American" and guilty of the cardinal sin of anti-Americanism, which derives not from honest criticism but from hatred of the good and the pure.

No wonder then that America has never had an organized left or a real opposition party, as has been the case in every European country. The substance of American discourse is that it is divided into black and white, evil and good, ours and theirs. It is the task of a lifetime to make a change in that Manichean duality that seems to be set forever in an unchanging ideological dimension. And so it is for most Europeans, who see America as having been their savior and as now their protector, yet whose embrace is both enc.u.mbering and annoying at the same time. Tony Blair's wholeheartedly pro-American position therefore seems even more puzzling to an outsider like myself. I am comforted that even to his own people, he seems like a humorless aberration, a European who has decided in effect to obliterate his own ident.i.ty in favor of this other one, represented by the lamentable Mr. Bush. I still have time to learn when Europe will come to its senses and a.s.sume the countervailing role to America that its size and history ent.i.tle it to play. Until then, the war approaches inexorably.

Al-Ahram, November 1420, 2002.

Al-Hayat, November 11, 2002.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN.

Misinformation About Iraq.

The flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation about the looming U.S. war against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq continues with increasing density. It is impossible to know, however, how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of psychological war against Iraq, and how much the public floundering of a government uncertain about its next step. In any event, I find it equally possible to believe that there will be a war or, on the other hand, that there won't be one. Certainly the sheer belligerency of the verbal a.s.saults on the average citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result that very little is totally certain about what is actually taking place. No one can independently confirm the various troop and navy movements reported on a daily basis, and given the lurching opacity of his thinking, George W. Bush's real intentions are difficult to read. But that the whole world is concerned- indeed, deeply anxious-about the catastrophic chaos that will ensue after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the people of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.

And yet one aspect of the deluge of opinion and fact that is most disturbing quite on its own and without reference to its actual intention is the spate of articles concerning post-Saddam Iraq. One that I'd like to discuss in particular is obviously part of a continuing effort by an Iraqi expatriate, Kanan Makiya, to promote himself as the father of what he calls a "non-Arab" and decentralized post-Ba'ath country. Now it is quite clear to anyone with the slightest concern about the travails of this rich and once-flourishing country that the years of Ba'ath rule have been disastrous, despite the regime's early program of development and building. So there can be little quarrel with trying to imagine what Iraq might look like if Saddam is toppled either by American intervention or by internal coup. Makiya's contribution to this effort has been a steady one, both on the airwaves and in quality journals, where he is given a platform to air his views, about which I shall speak in a moment. What has been made less clear, however, is who he is and from what background he emerges. I think it is important to know these things, if only to judge the value of his contribution and to understand more precisely the special quality of his thoughts and ideas.

Usually identified as having a research connection with Harvard and as a professor at Brandeis University (both in the Boston area), Makiya when I knew him first in the early 1970s was closely affiliated with the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As I recall, he was then an architecture student at MIT, but he hardly said anything during the occasions I saw him. Then he disappeared from view, or rather from my view. He surfaced in 1990 as Samir Khalil, the author of a vaunted book called The Republic of Fear that described Saddam Hussein's rule with considerable dread and drama. One of the media-rousing works of the first Gulf War, The Republic of Fear seemed to have been written-according to a fawning interview with Makiya that appeared in The New Yorker-while Makiya took time off from working as an a.s.sociate of his father's architectural firm in Iraq itself. He admitted in the interview that, in a sense, Saddam had financed the writing of his book indirectly, although no one accused Makiya of collaborating with a regime he obviously detested.

In his next book, Cruelty and Silence, Makiya attacked Arab intellectuals whom he accused of opportunism and immorality because they either praised various Arab regimes or remained silent about the various governments' abuses against their own people. Of course, Makiya said nothing about his own history of silence and complicity as a beneficiary of the Iraqi regime's munificence, even though, of course, he was ent.i.tled to work for whomever he pleased. But he said the vilest things about people like Mahmoud Darwish and myself for being nationalists, allegedly supporting extremism and, in Darwish's case, for having written an ode to Saddam. Most of what Makiya wrote in the book was, in my opinion, revolting, based on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation, but the book, of course, enjoyed a popular moment or two since it confirmed the view in the West that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists. It seemed not to matter that Makiya himself had worked for Saddam or that he had never written anything about the Arab regimes until his Republic of Fear, until, that is, he was out of Iraq and finished with his employment there. He was hailed here and there in America for being a brave man of conscience and for having defied the self-censoring practice of Arab intellectuals, but this praise was usually heaped on him by people who had no knowledge of the fact that Makiya himself never wrote in an Arab country and that whatever meager writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West.

Except for his two books and an article urging the U.S. administration to occupy Baghdad during the first Gulf War, Makiya wasn't much heard from after that. Then last year he produced an unreadable novel proving somehow that the Dome of the Rock was really built by a Jew; it was sent to me by the publisher, so I happened to have skimmed it before it appeared officially, but I was nevertheless aghast at how badly written it was, and how, unable to resist showing off how many books its author had read, it was peppered with footnotes, surely an unusual thing for what purported to be a work of fiction. It died a merciful death, however, and Makiya lapsed back into silence.

Until the government-inspired campaign against Iraq broke out a few months ago, Makiya had said little about the war against terror, the events of 9/11, and the war in Afghanistan. It is true that he did a kind of commentary for a popular American biweekly on Mohamed Atta's supposed Islamic terrorist handbook, but even by his standards, it was a negligible performance. I vividly recall, however, that late last summer I happened by chance to hear a radio interview with him in which he was identified for the first time as heading a U.S. State Department group planning for a postwar, post-Saddam Iraq. His name had not appeared among those mentioned as being part of the U.S.-funded Iraqi opposition groups; nor had he written anything that could be read by a member of the general public about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or any other Middle Eastern issues, although I had heard that he had visited Israel a number of times.

The most complete version of his plans for Iraq after an American invasion, which derive from his current employment as a resident employee of the U.S. Department of State, appears in the November 2002 issue of Prospect, a good liberal British monthly to which I subscribe. Makiya begins his "proposal" by enumerating the extraordinary a.s.sumptions behind his arguments, two of which almost by definition are unimaginable. The first is that "the unseating" of Saddam should not occur after a bombing campaign. Makiya must have been living on Mars to imagine that, in the event of a war, a ma.s.sive bombing attack would not occur, even though every single plan circulated for regime change in Iraq has stated explicitly that Iraq would be bombed mercilessly. The second a.s.sumption is equally imaginative, since Makiya seems to believe against all evidence that the United States is committed to democracy and nation-building in Iraq. Why he thinks that Iraq is like Germany and j.a.pan after World War II (both of which were rebuilt because of the cold war) is beyond me; besides, he doesn't once mention the fact that the United States is determined to bring down the Iraqi regime because of the country's oil reserves and because Iraq is an enemy of Israel. So he starts out by making preposterous a.s.sumptions that simply fly in the face of all the evidence.

Undeterred by such unimportant considerations, he presses on. Iraqis are committed to federalism, he says, rather than to a centralized government. The proof that he offers is pretty negligible. As in all his other attempts to convince his reader that he makes telling points, his logic here is weak because it is based equally on fictional supposition and on his own highly dubious personal affirmations. He is committed to federalism, and so he says are the Kurds. Where federalism as a system is supposed to come from (other than from his desk in the State Department), he doesn't bother to say. Clearly, he plans to have it imposed from the outside, although he makes the largely unsubstantiated claim that "everyone" is agreed that federalism in Iraq should be the outcome. This "means devolving power away from Baghdad to the provinces," presumably by a stroke of General Tommy Franks's pen. One would have thought that post-t.i.to Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country's federalism was a total success. But Makiya is so committed to his views as a kinglike theoretician of government that he simply ignores consequences, history, people, communities, and reality altogether so that he can make his ludicrously improbable case. This of course is exactly what the U.S. government likes, that is, to have miscellaneous Arab intellectuals who are responsible to no const.i.tuency urge the U.S. military on to war while pretending to be bringing "democracy" to the place, in full contradiction of America's real aims and its actual historical practices. Makiya seems not to have heard about ruinous U.S. interventions in Indochina, Afghanistan, Central America, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, and the Philippines, or that the United States is currently involved militarily with about eighty countries.

The grand climax of Makiya's justification for the invasion of Iraq by the United States is his proposal that the new Iraq should be non-Arab. (Along the way, he speaks contemptuously of Arab opinion, which, he says, will never amount to anything. This obviously clears the board for his airy speculations about both the future and the past.) How this magical de-Arabizing solution is to come about, Makiya doesn't say, any more than he shows us how Iraq is to be relieved of its Islamic ident.i.ty and its military capabilities. He refers to a mysterious alchemical quality he calls "territoriality" and proceeds to build another sand castle on that as the basis for a future state of Iraq. In the end, however, he volunteers that all this is going to be guaranteed "from the outside" by the United States. Where this has ever taken place before is not an issue that troubles Makiya, any more than he seems concerned about U.S. unilateralism and needless destructiveness.

One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry at Makiya's posturings. Clearly this is a man with no recorded experience of government or even of citizenship. Between countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except to his upwardly mobile career), he has now found a haven deep inside the U.S. government that he uses to fuel his amazingly speculative flights of fancy. For someone who has lectured his peers about intellectual responsibility and independent judgment, he provides examples of neither one nor the other. Exactly the opposite. Perched on a pulpit that has freed him from any accountability, he seems now to be serving a master who has paid him well for his services-as Saddam employed him in the past-and his versatile conscience. I find it incredible that Makiya allows himself such sanctimony and vanity, but then why shouldn't he? He has never engaged in a public debate with any of his fellow Iraqis, never written for an Arab audience, never put himself forward for an office or for any political role requiring personal courage and commitment. He has either written pseudonymously or attacked people who have had no chance to respond to his defamations.

It is sad that Makiya implicitly suggests that his is the voice and the example of the future Iraq. And to think that thousands of lives have already been lost to his patron's cruel sanctions, and that many more lives and livelihoods are about to be destroyed by electronic warfare wreaked on his country by George W. Bush's government. But this man is untroubled by any of this. Devoid of either compa.s.sion or real understanding, he prattles on for Anglo American audiences who seem satisfied that here at last is an Arab who exhibits the proper respect for their power and c