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THOUGHTS ABOUT
AMERICA

Edward Said
AL-AHRAM WEEKLY
March 02, 2002

http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/saidamer.cfm

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now
feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in
the United States at this moment provides us with an especially
unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite
specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional official
statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not
enemies of the United States, everything else about the current
situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab and
Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too
many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an
Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special
attention during airport security checks. There have been many
reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so
that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public
is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media
have run far too many "experts" and "commentators" on terrorism,
Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive
line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and
culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm of
the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems
to be the case with the projected attack to "end" Iraq. There are
US forces already in several countries with important Muslim
populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the buildup against
Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective
punishment of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like
great public approval in the United States.

While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is
more than what Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have
come to deeply resent the notion that I must accept the picture of
America as being involved in a "just war" against something
unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war
that has assigned us the role of either silent witnesses or
defensive immigrants who should be grateful to be allowed
residence in the US. The historical realities are different: America
is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of
laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly
exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who
now lives here as an American citizen originally came to these
shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and
Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not provide for different levels of
Americanness, nor for approved or disapproved forms of
"American behaviour," including things that have come to be called
"un-" or "anti- American" statements or attitudes. That is the
invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech and
behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former
rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the
importance of religion in America, he is not authorised to enforce
such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he
makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and
America and himself. The Constitution expressly separates church
and state.

There is worse. By passing the Patriot Act last November, Bush
and his compliant Congress have suppressed or abrogated or
abridged whole sections of the First, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth
Amendments, instituted legal procedures that give individuals no
recourse either to a proper defence or a fair trial, that allow secret
searches, eavesdropping, detention without limit, and, given the
treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, that allow the US
executive branch to abduct prisoners, detain them indefinitely,
decide unilaterally whether or not they are prisoners of war and
whether or not the Geneva Conventions apply to them -- which is
not a decision to be taken by individual countries. Moreover, as
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) said in a
magnificent speech given on 17 February, the president and his
men were not authorised to declare war (Operation Enduring
Freedom) against the world without limit or reason, were not
authorised to increase military spending to over $400 billion per
year, were not authorised to repeal the Bill of Rights. Furthermore,
he added -- the first such statement by a prominent, publicly
elected official -- "we did not ask that the blood of innocent people,
who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of
innocent villagers in Afghanistan." I strongly recommend that Rep.
Kucinich's speech, which was made with the best of American
principles and values in mind, be published in full in Arabic so that
people in our part of the world can understand that America is not
a monolith for the use of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but in
fact contains many voices and currents of opinion which this
government is trying to silence or make irrelevant.

The problem for the world today is how to deal with the
unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States, which
in effect has made no secret of the fact that it does not need
coordination with or approval of others in the pursuit of what a
small circle of men and women around Bush believe are its
interests. So far as the Middle East is concerned, it does seem
that since 11 September there has been almost an Israelisation of
US policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon and his associates have
cynically exploited the single-minded attention to "terrorism" by
George Bush and have used that as a cover for their continued
failed policy against the Palestinians. The point here is that Israel
is not the US and, mercifully, the US is not Israel: thus, even
though Israel commands Bush's support for the moment, Israel is
a small country whose continued survival as an ethnocentric state
in the midst of an Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on an
expedient if not infinite dependence on the US, but rather on
accommodation with its environment, not the other way round.
That is why I think Sharon's policy has finally been revealed to a
significant number of Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more
Israelis are taking the reserve officers' position against serving the
military occupation as a model for their approach and resistance.
This is the best thing to have emerged from the Intifada. It proves
that Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting occupation have
finally brought fruit.

What has not changed, however, is the US position, which has
been escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in
which Bush and his people identify themselves (as in the very
name of the military campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom) with
righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny, its external
enemies with an equally absolute evil. Anyone reading the world
press in the past few weeks can ascertain that people outside the
US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of US
policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create
enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without
much regard for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim,
concreteness of goal, or, worst of all, the legality of such actions.
What does it mean to defeat "evil terrorism" in a world like ours? It
cannot mean eradicating everyone who opposes the US, an infinite
and strangely pointless task; nor can it mean changing the world
map to suit the US, substituting people we think are "good guys"
for evil creatures like Saddam Hussein. The radical simplicity of all
this is attractive to Washington bureaucrats whose domain is
either purely theoretical or who, because they sit behind desks in
the Pentagon, tend to see the world as a distant targe t for the
US's
very real and virtually unopposed power. For if you live 10,000
miles away from any known evil state and you have at your
disposal acres of warplanes, 19 aircraft carriers, and dozens of
submarines, plus a million and a half people under arms, all of
them willing to serve their country idealistically in the pursuit of
what Bush and Condoleezza Rice keep referring to as evil, the
chances are that you will be willing to use all that power sometime,
somewhere, especially if the administration keeps asking for (and
getting) billions of dollars to be added to the already swollen
defence budget.

From my point of view, the most shocking thing of all is that with
few exceptions most prominent intellectuals and commentators in
this country have tolerated the Bush programme, tolerated and in
some flagrant cases, tried to go beyond it, toward more self-
righteous sophistry, more uncritical self-flattery, more specious
argument. What they will not accept is that the world we live in,
the historical world of nations and peoples, is moved and can be
understood by politics, not by huge general absolutes like good
and evil, with America always on the side of good, its enemies on
the side of evil. When Thomas Friedman tiresomely sermonises to
Arabs that they have to be more self-critical, missing in anything
he says is the slightest tone of self- criticism. Somehow, he thinks,
the atrocities of 11 September entitle him to preach at others, as if
only the US had suffered such terrible losses, and as if lives lost
elsewhere in the world were not worth lamenting quite as much or
drawing as large moral conclusions from.

One notices the same discrepancies and blindness when Israeli
intellectuals concentrate on their own tragedies and leave out of
the equation the much greater suffering of a dispossessed people
without a state, or an army, or an air force, or a proper leadership,
that is, Palestinians whose suffering at the hands of Israel
continues minute by minute, hour by hour. This sort of moral
blindness, this inability to evaluate and weigh the comparative
evidence of sinner and sinned against (to use a moralistic
language that I normally avoid and detest) is very much the order
of the day, and it must be the critical intellectual's job not to fall
into -- indeed, actively to campaign against falling into -- the trap.
It is not enough to say blandly that all human suffering is equal,
then to go on basically bewailing one's own miseries: it is far more
important to see what the strongest party does, and to question
rather than justify that. The intellectual's is a voice in opposition
to
and critical of great power, which is consistently in need of a
restraining and clarifying conscience and a comparative
perspective, so that the victim will not, as is often the case, be
blamed and real power encouraged to do its will.

A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what
I thought of a declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was
published in all the major French, German, Italian and other
continental papers but which did not appear in the US at all,
except on the Internet where few people took notice of it. This
declaration took the form of a pompous sermon about the
American war against evil and terrorism being "just" and in
keeping with American values, as defined by these self-appointed
interpreters of our country. Paid for and sponsored by something
called the Institute for American Values, whose main (and
financially well- endowed) aim is to propagate ideas in favour of
families, "fathering" and "mothering," and God, the declaration was
signed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick
Moynihan among many others, but basically written by a
conservative feminist academic, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Its main
arguments about a "just" war were inspired by were inspired by
Professor Michael
Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with the pro-Israel lobby
in this country, and whose role is to justify everything Israel does
by recourse to vaguely leftist principles. In signing this
declaration,
Walzer has given up all pretension to leftism and, like Sharon,
allies himself with an interpretation (and a questionable one at
that) of America as a righteous warrior against terror and evil, the
more to make it appear that Israel and the US are similar
countries with similar aims.

Nothing could be further from the truth, since Israel is not the state
of its citizens but of all the Jewish people, while the US is most
assuredly only the state of its citizens. Moreover, Walzer never
has the courage to state boldly that in supporting Israel he is
supporting a state structured by ethno-religious principles, which
(with typical hypocrisy) he would oppose in the United States if this
country were declared to be white and Christian.

Walzer's inconsistencies and hypocrisies aside, the document is
really addressed to "our Muslim brethren" who are supposed to
understand that America's war is not against Islam but against
those who oppose all sorts of principles, which it would be hard to
disagree with. Who could oppose the principle that all human
beings are equal, that killing in the name of God is a bad thing,
that freedom of conscience is excellent, and that "the basic subject
of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of
government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for
human flourishing"? In what follows, however, America turns out to
be the aggrieved party and, even though some of its mistakes in
policy are acknowledged very briefly (and without mentioning
anything specific in detail), it is depicted as hewing to principles
unique to the United States, such as that all people possess
inherent moral dignity and status, that universal moral truths exist
and are available to everyone, or that civility is important where
there is disagreement, and that freedom of conscience and religion
are a reflection of basic human dignity and are universally
recognised. Fine. For although the authors of this sermon say it is
often the case that such great principles are contravened, no
sustained attempt is made to say where and when those
contraventions actually occur (as they do all the time), or whether
they have been more contravened than followed, or anything as
concrete as that. Yet in a long footnote, Walzer and his colleagues
set forth a list of how many American "murders" have occurred at
Muslim and Arab hands, including those of the Marines in Beirut in
1983, as well as other military combatants. Somehow making a list
of that kind is worth making for these militant defenders of
America, whereas the murder of Arabs and Muslims -- including
the hundreds of thousands killed with American weapons by Israel
with US support, or the hundreds of thousands killed by US-
maintained sanctions against the innocent civilian population of
Iraq -- need be neither mentioned nor tabulated. What sort of
dignity is there in humiliating Palestinians by Israel, with American
complicity and even cooperation, and where is the nobility and
moral conscience of saying nothing as Palestinian children are
killed, millions besieged, and millions more kept as stateless
refugees? Or for that matter, the millions killed in Vietnam,
Columbia, Turkey, and Indonesia with American support and
acquiescence?

All in all, this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by
American intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither
a statement of real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism
against the arrogant use of power, but rather is the opening salvo
in a new cold war declared by the US in full ironic cooperation, it
would seem, with with those Islamists who have argued that "our" war
is with the West and with America. Speaking as someone with a
claim on America and the Arabs, I find this sort of hijacking
rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it pretends to the
elucidation of principles and the declaration of values, it is in fact
exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in blinding
readers with a patriotic rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it
overrides real politics, real history, and real moral issues. Despite
its vulgar trafficking in great "principles and values," it does none
of that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed to
cow foreign readers into submission. I have a feeling that this
document wasn't published here for two reasons: one is that it
would be so severely criticised by American readers that it would
be laughed out of court and two, that it was designed as part of a
recently announced, extremely well-funded Pentagon scheme to
put out propaganda as part of the war effort, and therefore
intended for foreign consumption.

Whatever the case, the publication of "What are American
Values?" augurs a new and degraded era in the production of
intellectual discourse. For when the intellectuals of the most
powerful country in the history of the world align themselves so
flagrantly with that power, pressing that power's case instead of
urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication and
understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual
war against communism, which we now know brought far too
many compromises, collaborations and fabrications on the part of
intellectuals and artists who should have played an altogether
different role. Subsidised and underwritten by the government (the
CIA especially, which went as far as providing for the subvention
of magazines like Encounter, underwrote scholarly research, travel
and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions), those militantly
unreflective and uncritical intellectuals and artists in the 1950s and
1960s brought to the whole notion of intellectual honesty and
complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For along with that
effort went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate
critics, and restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself, this
is a shameful episode in our history, and we must be on our guard
against and resist its return.