[Dialogue] A view from Al-Ahram Weekly this week

Sat Oct 22 01:06:53 EDT 2005

Conning history

Azmi Bishara delves into the real meaning of Bush-speak 

Ever since the US began its march against the region beneath the banner of
democracy its neo- conservative standard bearers have been unflagging in
their insistence that democracy and freedom are universally applicable --
are, indeed, the cornerstones of some divine cosmic design. This
metaphysical take on freedom is reminiscent of the young Marx, and of the
neo-Hegelians in general, following the first wave of popular democratic
uprisings in Europe in 1848. As applied today it contains many revolutionary
implications, not least the ostensible rejection of the racist notion that
the Islamic civilisation -- or any other culture, for that matter -- is
inimical to democracy. Democracy is valid across time and space, is good for
every state and society. So Bush has affirmed repeatedly, most recently in
his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on 6 October. 

What's so hard to understand here? Not the perverted Trotskyism of the
neo-conservatives, with their version of permanent revolution fuelled by
exporting democracy. What is hard to understand, though, is how, in terms of
foreign policy, they have placed themselves alongside those they would
ordinarily be staring at from over the fence. To read Samuel Huntington
since he started writing about the clash of civilisations in Foreign Affairs
in 1993, and Bernard Lewis before him, is to understand that Islamic
civilisation, as a culture and system of values, is averse to democracy.
Such a notion is presumably antithetical to the precepts of the neo-cons. So
why don't we ever hear them criticising Huntington or Lewis? Why are they
still crossing paths and exchanging ideas in the same strategic research
centres and political circles? 

To get bogged down in the theoretical subtleties of these people blinds us
to the bigger picture. Both groups, in fact, are part of a single trend in
American foreign policy. One group of the conservatives' culture clash
theory holds that Islam is inherently hostile to democracy, drums up hatred
and sounds the war cry, while the other group furnishes the pretexts for
going to war. 

In contrast to what the neo-cons actually say the fact that democracy has,
in their view, to be imposed on the Islamic world by force implicitly
seconds the contention that Islam is inherently hostile to democracy. The
relationship between the two is much closer than the neo-con youths and the
venerable conservative university professors care to imagine.

In practice, the idea of spreading democracy became the retroactive
justification for the invasion of Iraq after the pretexts of WMD and Saddam
Hussein's ostensible links with terrorism and 11 September were shown to be
hollow. The US thus revealed itself as ready to treat democracy
pragmatically, instead of as a ready-for-export value system. Exactly how
pragmatic it could be becomes ever more apparent in its dealings with Arab
regimes, which it classifies not in accordance with some democratic standard
but, as Bush's recent speech demonstrated, on the basis of whether they are
friendly or hostile, moderate or radical. Clearly, in the pursuit of US
interests democracy and abiding by democratic principles are not
Washington's primary criteria in its dealings with this part of the world,
and when things come down to the crunch such intellectual niceties can be
set aside altogether. 

A similar attitude prevailed at the time of the Cold War. The neo-cons have
since apologised to the Arabs for American Cold War policies that overlooked
the nature of the regimes of America's allies, to the detriment of the
forces of democracy and civil and human rights advocates in those countries.
But then so imperative was confronting the greater Soviet peril at the time
that the US could not afford the luxury of attending to such details as
human rights abuses and the other ills of dictatorship. Now advocates of
exporting democracy, especially to the Arab world, have created the image of
a monolithic global peril and the exigencies of the new war they have
initiated beneath the banner of democracy may require the forging of
alliances that ignore democracy. Any comparison between Bush's speech to the
National Endowment for Democracy two years ago, in which his call to spread
democracy brought to mind Huntington's ideas about the three waves of
democratisation, and his recent speech to the same institution in which he
spoke of the need to combat "Islamic terrorism" and "Islamic fascism", leads
to the conclusion that Washington has entered a new phase in its
characterisation of the enemy. 

Peace is now synonymous with "complete victory" over the new enemy. Bush
continuously makes a point of distinguishing between Islam and the enemy
that exploits Islam. But who, exactly, is this enemy? Bush compares it to
those "other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot". Like
them the new enemy has "totalitarian aims". Its ultimate aim is to
"establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia". So
earnest is Bush in drawing these comparisons and conclusions that he even
takes the trouble to quote Abu Musaab Al-Zarqawi and Osama Bin Laden.

"The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of
our new century," Bush proclaimed. Imagine the impact of this statement by
the leader of the only empire on earth on anyone who hates America. 

The other danger in Bush's speech is that in likening the confrontation
against this enemy to the confrontation against fascism and communism he
justifies alliances with non-democratic forces. And where does that bring
us? Back to square one. A war is waged for the sake of democracy and out of
the belief that despotism breeds terrorism and that democracy is the only
way to fight terrorism. Then the war and subsequent occupation contribute to
expanding the scale of terrorism to the extent that it becomes acceptable to
align with despotic forces to defeat it. The neo-cons have really outdone
themselves.

Bush's speech before the National Endowment for Democracy constitutes a
major statement of his administration's foreign policy ideology. Coming in
the wake of the difficulties this administration is facing because of
Hurricane Katrina, Bush's nomination of his personal lawyer as a Supreme
Court judge and the disillusionment of the neo-cons over his domestic
policy, the speech was clearly intended to strengthen the administration's
ideological grip at home. Little wonder that it regurgitated so many
preconceptions about Islam promulgated in the popular press in the US and
then refined and repackaged as an address presented to the American public
delivered with the authority of the leader of the world's sole superpower. 

Anyone who compares this speech with previous ones delivered in the same
venue cannot help but be struck by how much was said about terrorism in the
latest speech and how little was said about democracy. Bush's speechwriters
know that many illusions have been dispelled in the last two years. They
realised that they had to take the American public on a discursive detour
around the policies that have bogged down American forces in Iraq and led to
the mounting death toll of American soldiers. That route presented audiences
with an enemy unlike any previously encountered. Terrorism is so great an
evil that it even overshadows the types of government that breed it.
Terrorism is the axis of evil. It has, if we are to be taken in by this
rhetoric, created a whole new historical epoch. It is not just an evil, it
is evil in the absolute. It arose not for any identifiable reasons and it
cannot be dealt with rationally because it makes no demands to which one can
reasonably respond. It is bent solely on annihilation, and what it wants to
annihilate is the US, or the Western way of life, or democracy, or progress
and freedom. It is an elitist fringe movement that seeks to impose its views
on the masses, as was the case with past totalitarian movements, and it will
stop at nothing to impose its sway, confident that people in the West are
too weak and decadent to stand up against it -- this latter is supported by
a quote from Al-Zarqawi. Finally, the speech gets round to Iraq. Terrorism
has spread in Iraq with the aim of aborting the transition to democracy. The
more determined America is to ensure the success of this transition, the
more desperate the terrorists become. The point here is to prepare the
public for the mounting sacrifices the US is going to have to sustain, not
because of the occupation, but because of "the enemy". 

For the US to leave Iraq now, Bush continued, as it turned tail and fled
from Somalia and Lebanon, would be to abandon Iraq to Al-Zarqawi and Bin
Laden. (A brief reminder -- there were no Zarqawis or Bin Ladens in Iraq
before the American occupation). 

The speech transcended all bounds between reality and fancy. Take, for
example, how Bush interpolates the caution cited by opponents to the war
that the invasion would unleash terrorist violence. Unlike them Bush makes
no reference to the social and political background that preceded the
invasion. Instead, he says: "Defeating a militant network is difficult
because it thrives like a parasite on the suffering and frustration of
others. The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of
victimisation in which someone else is always to blame and violence is
always the solution. They exploit resentful and disillusioned young men and
women, recruiting them through radical mosques as the pawns of terror." 

But what is the nature of the suffering these radicals exploit? No
information is forthcoming on that problem and its sources. And the "local
conflicts" they exploit? A reference to the Israeli occupation, one
presumes. 

A culture of victimisation in which someone else is always to blame and
violence always the solution? Don't, in short, blame the American
occupation, blame the resistance to the occupation as the source of
terrorism. 

The distortion and hyperbole reach a peak in the following: "Some have also
argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition
in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or
triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq
on 11 September, 2001, and Al-Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the
radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is
no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation
Iraqi Freedom, and yet militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren
in Beslan." 

No one ever suggested that the motive behind the 11 September attacks was
the American presence in Iraq. What happened was that the Bush
administration seized upon the opportunity to suggest that Iraq was involved
in that attack in order to build up a cause for invading. I recall that
Richard Clarke, the White House's anti-terrorism coordinator at the time,
declared, in testimony to Congress, that he had felt physically ill when he
realised that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had been trying from day one of the
attacks to push for war against Iraq. Any Iraqi would be able to tell you
that America's purpose in invading Iraq was not to fight terrorism. Iraq was
invaded and occupied in spite of the fact that Saddam's regime had no
connection with terrorism. As for the appallingly savage attack on the
school in Beslan, setting aside the fact that, in the Russian tradition,
Putin responded like Bruce Lee in a china shop, the incident had nothing to
do with Russia not supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom and everything to do
with Chechnya. 

Bush, in his speech, quickly turns to the US presence in Saudi Arabia and
the Israeli occupation of Palestine. These are not ills of foreign
intervention or a prolonged and systematic injustice, but examples of the
terrorists' "litany of excuses for violence", on par with "the defeat of the
Taliban or the crusades of a thousand years ago". And as long as the Israeli
occupation, for example, is no more than just a pretext for terrorist
violence, then there is no reason to end the reality of that occupation. 

In his speech before the National Endowment for Democracy two years ago Bush
said that just as American democracy had its roots in the British parliament
so could the National Endowment, and Bush's own administration, trace its
policies to Ronald Reagan's speech to Britain's two houses of parliament. In
that speech Reagan announced that the tide had turned against the evil of
Soviet communism. Two years ago Bush's speechwriters adroitly inserted some
witty remarks about the sophisticated European's reaction to Reagan's
apparent naiveté, the point being that, regardless of how witless an
American president -- i.e. Bush -- might appear as he reads out a speech
written for him he may in fact play a great historical role in dealing with
an evil that only understands the language of force. In effect, Bush was
telling his audiences that he may look idiotic and clueless, but his words
are just as prophetic as those of another idiotic president, Ronald Reagan.
And that is only the surface of what must be the biggest confidence trick in
history. 

Peace,

Harry

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