Clash of Barbarisms

The Making of the New World Disorder

Gilbert Achcar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317262374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

"This inquiry into the probable shape of things to come is sober, uncompromising, deeply informed, and full of provocative insights and judicious analyses." Noam Chomsky "The most forceful, most rigorous text that there is to read on this war." Le Monde Diplomatique The volatile Middle East is the site of vast resources, profound passions, frequent crises, and long-standing conflicts, as well as a major source of international tensions and a key site of direct U.S. intervention. Two of the most astute analysts of this part of the world are Noam Chomsky, the preeminent critic of U.S. foreign policy, and Gilbert Achcar, a leading specialist of the Middle East who lived in that region for many years. In their new book, Chomsky and Achcar bring a keen understanding of the internal dynamics of the Middle East and of the role of the United States, taking up all the key questions of interest to concerned citizens, including such topics as terrorism, fundamentalism, conspiracies, oil, democracy, self-determination, anti-Semitism, and anti-Arab racism, as well as the war in Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the sources of U.S. foreign policy. This book provides the best readable introduction for all who wish to understand the complex issues related to the Middle East from a perspective dedicated to peace and justice.

ONE

Narcissistic Compassion and Global Spectacle

Every attempt to explain the descent into terrorism that culminated in the suicide attacks of 11 September 2001, as a consequence of the deplorable state of the world we live in, has run up against a barrage of vicious polemical artillery. In a climate of intellectual intimidation bearing a certain resemblance to the dark hours of the Cold War, the intimidation relies on two deliberate amalgams.

Anti-Americanism and ‘Values’

First, according to the censors, any systematic critique of the US government’s actions is evidence of an ignominious ‘anti-Americanism’. The recrudescence of the use of this term, particularly since the Kosovo war, in order to discredit criticism of Washington’s policies inevitably evokes the memory of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which became notorious not that many years ago in the run-up to McCarthyism. This ‘paranoid’ logic¹ always ends up devouring its own children, as it did in the past when Republican Senator Joe McCarthy went so far as to take on Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In keeping with this same logic, accusations of anti-Americanism have already been levelled against Washington’s most loyal allies as soon as they dared express the slightest reservation about the Bush Administration’s actions.

Accordingly, following criticisms of the treatment of the prisoners transferred to the US military base at Guantánamo in Cuba, the European edition of the Wall Street Journal opened its columns to a certain Stephen Pollard, who explained that the European media’s ‘quite grotesque’ commentaries showed that ‘European anti-Americanism is not the exclusive preserve of the left, nor of Continentals.’² The European ‘Left’, allegedly represented by the Guardian and Le Monde, naturally hates Americans, wrote Pollard; these two dailies ‘were filled with articles protesting, Je ne suis pas americain!’ (Like Hermione in Racine’s Andromaque, Le Monde could rightly complain in this case of its ‘love repaid with black ingratitude’.) But the European Right and Centre are just as anti-American, Pollard continued, and include ‘many of the real enemies – some might say the most vitriolic.’ Besides, ‘the anti-Americanism of the British establishment is as deep as that elsewhere’, as the articles in the very conservative Daily Telegraph or those of the Thatcherite Matthew Parris in the Times show. All these anti-Americans had been concealing their perfidy, but the Guantánamo affair ‘revealed them in their true colors’.

The second amalgam that the censors have used to intimidate the US government’s critics amounts to dismissing any explanation of 11 September that mentions the existence of injustice in the world as equivalent to a justification of mass murder – as if it were inconceivable for one form of barbarism to engender another, equally reprehensible form of barbarism.

Salman Rushdie himself, though he of all people ought to be particularly allergic to anything resembling excommunication, joined the fray with all the zeal of a neophyte. (He became a New Yorker himself quite recently.) In the Washington Post he violently took on the ‘sanctimonious moral relativism’ of those who think that the United States ought to change its own conduct, accusing them of carrying out a ‘bien-pensant anti-American onslaught’. He treated them to this devastating and original moral lesson – without any sanctimony, of course: ‘Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming US government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions.’³ One quite simple idea did not occur to the author of the Satanic Verses: that without in any way ‘excusing’ mass terrorism, one can hold the government of the United States responsible for its own actions and the hatred that they call forth. It thus bears a share of the responsibility for what happens to its citizens when they end up being used as targets by those who commit the – unquestionably reprehensible and unjustifiable – crime of revenging themselves for oppression carried out from Washington by murdering US civilians.

In any event, hasn’t the US government indirectly acknowledged its own responsibility by indemnifying the victims’ families, and asking them in return to commit themselves in writing not to take any legal action against it for what happened on 11 September?⁴ A banker whose father died in a 1975 attack emphasized this same point in an article in the Wall Street Journal: ‘By creating a first-of its- kind fund with an estimated $4.6 billion of taxpayer money (in addition to providing full federal tax amnesty for 2000 and 2001), the federal government is implicitly accepting blame for the September attacks.’⁵ The author proceeded to cite many other attacks after which the government did not compensate the victims’ families at all. This was the case, for example, with all those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing who were not federal employees: ‘cafeteria workers, parents of the children killed in the day-care center, and those who died visiting the building received no federal benefits whatsoever.’⁶

In a country where everything has a price tag, we can in any case see a prosaic, monetary motive in the government’s haggling with some of the 11 September victims’ families. This at least supplements the political motives that led the White House to deny categorically and virulently, in the teeth of the evidence, any cause-and-effect relationship between US foreign policy and the attacks that targeted it. Thus, whereas the forty-first president, George H. W. Bush, tacitly acknowledged the link between ‘the threat of terror’ and injustice in the world in his speech of 11 September 1990, his son George W. Bush, the forty-third president, quickly exerted himself to rule out of court any explanation of the kind. According to presidential ukase, the crimes of 11 September 2001 could not be conceived of as a reaction to any legitimately questionable aspects of US policy, in the Middle East or anywhere else. They could only be the product of a visceral rejection of the noblest ‘values’ of the United States and the West. According to Bush Junior, in his speech on 20 September 2001, delivered like his father’s to a joint session of Congress, the terrorists had to have acted out of hatred of democracy and freedom.

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber – a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble, and disagree with each other.⁷

Addressing both the American people and their elected representatives, George W. Bush thus took them all for the kind of simpletons who could believe that the 11 September kamikazes hated the United States enough to die killing as many people as possible on its soil simply out of abhorrence for democratic institutions and civil liberties. The argument is all the more mind-boggling inasmuch as it is followed directly by the – in this case undeniable – statement that the attackers aimed at overthrowing the governments of their own countries: ‘They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.’ Could Bush have thought that these three countries have democratically elected governments, too?

As if to illustrate the frankness that is the benefit of a certain degree of ‘realism’, Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, countered allegations of this kind with a good dose of common sense:

Al-Qa‘ida may have originated in the Wahhabi branch of radical Islam – which rejects Western civilization – but it has not attacked targets in the Western world at random. Nor has it concentrated its efforts against the most secular and permissive Western nations, which are in Europe, not North America.

On the contrary, bin Laden’s terrorist network has been obsessively focused on the United States. The reason is that specific US policies are unacceptable to al-Qa‘ida and threaten its perceived core interests and beliefs.⁸

Absolute and Relative Evil

The most effective and intimidating obstacle of all to critical thought about the meaning of 11 September has, however, been the tendency to treat the event itself as something absolute and unparalleled. Is there anything that has not been said or written about 11 September 2001? Just one example among many, admittedly a particularly grandiloquent one: ‘We will live, and our children will live on, in a history in which the explosion of the Towers is redrawing the map of the world and tracing the unreachable horizon of a terrorist twilight of humanity.’⁹ In a somewhat more sober key, innumerable commentators have proffered the supposed insight that 11 September was a major historic turning point in world history comparable to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. The latter had been mythologized not long before the attacks in a Hollywood mega-production serving the cause, dear to George W. Bush, of a missile shield. The ‘new Pearl Harbor’ of 11 September, which the president declared the next day to be an act of ‘war’ even more than of ‘terrorism’, was immediately elevated to the rank of the opening shots of a new war, baptized unhesitatingly by many ‘World War III’. The banner title under CNN’s special broadcasts was quickly changed from ‘America Under Attack’ to ‘America at War.’

The 1991 Gulf war in its day was already called a ‘CNN war’. But the 11 September attacks undeniably marked a new peak in media globalization. No event has ever been watched by as many people as has the attack on Manhattan’s Twin Towers, either live or on tape. It has been rebroadcast on television stations around the world in continuous loops and made available in the form of videos and stills on an incalculable number of websites, without even mentioning what are now called ‘print media’. The corollary to this historic record is that no event has ever been as massively, pre-eminently subject to the magnifying effect of TV broadcasts on its perception – a magnifying effect which is also a deforming effect, of course. As Naomi Klein wrote in a clever reaction, ‘[V]iewed through the US television networks, Tuesday’s [11 September] attack seemed to come less from another country than another planet.’¹⁰

Yet to the extent that 11 September 2001 and its aftermath are thought to be crucial events with implications for the future of humanity, critical reflection on their meaning should be considered all the more essential to the public interest. A real critical effort is therefore called for, first of all so as to dissipate the prevailing impressionism that has turned these horrible attacks into an absolute incarnation of evil. As it happens, we are not dealing with a simple metaphor. George W. Bush has invoked the metaphysical notion of ‘evil’ on several occasions, deliberately using the term that, as we know too well, Ronald Reagan once applied to the Soviet Union. At that time the United States was backing today’s ‘evil’, the shock troops of Islamic fundamentalism, against yesterday’s ‘Evil Empire’, the USSR. The United States, as is only proper, still incarnates ‘good’ – should it perhaps be called ‘the Good Empire’?¹¹

Washington is calling on the imagery of the Second World War for the third time since the end of the Cold War, after having resuscitated Hitler successively in the shape of Saddam Hussein and then of Slobodan Miloševiā. Continuing down the road of this playground ethics, George W. Bush has designated three of the ‘rogue states’ (as they are called in Washingtonese), Iraq, Iran and North Korea, along with their ‘terrorist allies’, as an ‘Axis of Evil’. The phrase originated in his first State of the Union speech to Congress on 29 January 2002, in which the president used the term ‘evil’ five times. A study of all the occurrences of this word and its various derivatives in public speeches in the United States since 11 September would certainly come up with staggering results.

Evil, in its metaphysical, absolute sense, is a notion common to the fundamentalist, reactionary religious world-view that Bush and bin Laden share. To use the apt formula of the celebrated German TV presenter Ulrich Wickert, the two men share similar ‘mental structures’ (Denkstrukturen).¹² George W. Bush actually stands today at the head of the Protestant fundamentalist movement in the United States, as a recent Washington Post article explained:

For the first time since religious conservatives became a modern political movement, the president of the United States has become the movement’s de facto leader – a status that even Ronald Reagan, though admired by religious conservatives, never earned. Christian publications, radio, and television shower Bush with praise, while preachers from the pulpit treat his leadership as an act of providence. A procession of religious leaders who have met with him testify to his faith, while websites encourage people to fast and pray for the president.¹³

The president’s speech, after the manner of all religious discourse, has even become a topic of theological discussion. To top it off, there are even criticisms of George W. Bush’s intransigence based on Christian forgiveness, which parallel moderate Islamic criticisms of the religious exhortations by the head of the al-Qa‘ida network.

‘The evil one’: Mr Bush has regularly used this phrase to describe Osama bin Laden. Among evangelical Christians, it is an obvious reference to Satan, and appears throughout the Bible. From Matthew, in the New American Standard Bible: ‘When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.’

Mr Bush was raised an Episcopalian, became a Methodist after his marriage, and then in 1986 said he was recommitting his heart to Jesus Christ: a born-again experience, at least in the words of evangelicals, although the president has not used that term to describe himself. Still, evangelicals recognize the terminology of ‘the evil one’ as their own.

But some in the evangelical movement have questioned the phrase. ‘The problem with “the evil one” is that in Christian thought, the only one who is totally, hopelessly evil is Satan’, said Richard J. Mouw, the president of F...