polemic II

"Let's get straight to what is so unwise about this war, leaving aside for the moment its illegality and international unpopularity. In the first place, no one has satisfactorily proved that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction that furnish an imminent threat to the United States. Iraq is a hugely weakened and ineffective Third World state ruled by a hated despotic regime: there is no disagreement about that anywhere, least of all in the Arab and Islamic world. But that after 12 years of sanctions it is a threat of any kind to any other state is a laughable notion, and not a single journalist of the overpaid legions who swarm around the Pentagon, State Department and White House has ever bothered to investigate it.

Iraq might once have been a potential challenge to Israel. It was the one Arab country with the human and natural resources, as well as the infrastructure, to take on Israel's arrogant brutality. That is why Begin bombed Iraq pre-emptively in 1981, supplying a model for the US in its own pre-emptive war. How regrettable that the media have failed to elucidate the Likud's slow takeover of US military and political thinking about the Arab world. So fearful has everyone been of the charge of anti-semitism that the stranglehold of the neo-conservative cum Christian Right cum Pentagon civilian hawks on American policy is now a reality which forces the entire country into an attitude of undifferentiated bellicosity."

e said on iraq

"Fouad Ajami is a Lebanese Shia educated in the US who made his name as a pro-Palestinian commentator. But by the mid-1980s, he was teaching at Johns Hopkins; he'd become a fervent anti-Arab ideologue and had been taken up by the right-wing Zionist lobby (he now works for Martin Peretz and Mort Zuckerman) and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is fond of describing himself as a non-fiction Naipaul and quotes Conrad while sounding as hokey as Khalil Gibran. He also has a penchant for catchy one-liners, ideally suited to television. The author of two or three books, he has become influential as a 'native informant' - the Arab 'expert' is a rare species on American networks. Ten years ago, he started deploying 'we' as an imperial collectivity which, along with Israel, never does anything wrong. Arabs are to blame for everything and therefore deserve 'our' contempt and hostility.

Ajami has always had it in for Iraq. He was an early advocate of the 1991 war and has, I think, deliberately misled the American strategic mind into believing that 'our' power can set things straight. Dick Cheney quoted him in a major speech last August as saying that Iraqis would welcome 'us' as liberators in 'the streets of Basra' - which still fights on as I write. Like Lewis, Ajami hasn't been a resident of the Arab world for years, although he is rumoured to be close to the Saudis, of whom he has recently spoken as models for the Arab world's future governance."

expat iraqi opposition hey

"What is truly puzzling is that the prevailing American ideology is still underpinned by the view that US power is basically benign and altruistic. This surely accounts for the outrage expressed by US pundits and officials that Iraqis should have had the gall to resist at all, or that, when captured, US soldiers were exhibited on Iraqi TV. Apparently this is much worse than showing rows of Iraqi prisoners made to kneel or lie spread-eagled in the sand. Breaches of the Geneva Conventions are invoked not for Camp X-Ray but for Saddam, and when his forces hide inside cities, that is cheating, while high-altitude bombing is playing fair.

This is the most reckless war in modern times. It is all about imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in its violence and the cruelty of its technology."