Redesigning foreign policy

WHAT is Pakistan’s greatest need at this difficult moment in its history — perhaps the most difficult in its entire history? It is to craft a foreign policy that would suit its purpose. But what is that purpose? It is a very limited one — to produce an environment in which Pakistan’s 150 million people can achieve their full potential, in which today’s adult population can look to the future with hope and with the expectation that their children will live lives better than their own.

But if that is the only purpose, why should the formulation of foreign policy hold the highest priority? If the main purpose of public policy is framed in very narrow economic terms, then Islamabad should be concerned mostly with economics and not with foreign affairs. Why should the limited analytical resources of the government be wasted on how it deals with the world and its neighbours and not with how it should raise and deploy financial resources and human capital for development?

The answer is simple. In Pakistan it has never been possible to divorce economic policy-making from foreign policy. That was as true in the late 1940s and the entire decade of the 1950s as it is today. Right from the time of its birth, the leaders of Pakistan looked to the world outside to gain support for the cause of Kashmir, to balance the perceived threat from India, and to obtain resources for development they could not raise at home. Half a century later, the new generation of Pakistani leaders is concerned with the same set of problems.

Even if the dispute over Kashmir is settled somehow and if India did not pose a threat to Pakistan’s territorial integrity and its survival as a nation state, Islamabad would still be concerned with foreign policy. It will still need a massive and sustained flow of foreign finance to deal with an economic situation that remains difficult in spite of three years of strenuous efforts to stabilize the economy and move it forward on a path of sustained growth. To deal with a steadily worsening situation with respect to the incidence of poverty highlighted by a report recently issued by the World Bank, Pakistan needs income per head of its population to grow at a rate of at least three per cent a year.

Translating this finding to the situation in Pakistan means that the country must set a growth target of between 5.5 and 6.0 per cent a year to be achieved over the next two to three years and to be sustained for decades thereafter. To move in that direction, the Pakistani economy will need a large infusion of resources and, for some time to come, a significant proportion of these will need to come from abroad. In spite of the strenuous efforts made by the administration of President Pervez Musharraf over the last three years to improve domestic resource generation, the gap between desired levels of investment and available domestic resources remains large. It will have to be filled by money coming in from foreign sources of finance.

Foreign flows can take several forms: earnings from exports, remittances sent by the country’s citizens living and working abroad, assistance provided by multilateral and bilateral agencies, equity investment made by foreigners in the capital markets, and foreign direct investment. The quantum of these flows is dependent critically on the relations Pakistan maintains with the world’s capital surplus countries. This is where foreign policy meets economic development.

But putting together a foreign policy that would well serve the country’s purpose is a more difficult task today than was the case half a century — or even a quarter century — ago. In the 1950s, when Pakistan chose to align itself closely with America, the world was neatly arranged into two competing blocs — the West dominated by the United States and the East controlled by the Soviet Union. The first generation of Pakistani leaders did not need to think very hard or for very long before choosing the world they wanted to be in: they aligned themselves firmly with America. Once that decision was taken, the country received a copious amount of military and economic assistance that produced the miracle of growth during the period of Ayub Khan.

Would Pakistan, over the long run, have fared better had it followed India, its neighbour, into the non-aligned movement and not tied itself so closely with the United States? Had Pakistan turned inwards rather than outwards, as India and China did in the early phases of their own development efforts, would it have achieved a higher rate of GDP growth over half a century and not produced just one economic miracle that lasted for only one decade?

These are a few examples of “what if” questions sometimes asked by historians to develop a better understanding of how policies shape the future. It is possible to reflect on the consequences over the long term of a different foreign policy stance than the one actually adopted in the 1950s. But today we must deal with the present moment and prepare ourselves for the world order that will inevitably emerge once the present moment passes.

In what I might call my series of “Iraq articles,” published in this space over the last several weeks, I concluded with the thought that America’s war against the regime of President Saddam Hussein was not motivated by a few reasons simple to decipher. Helping Israel in its long feud with the Palestinians was certainly a contributing factor in the American decision to opt for war as a solution to the Iraq problem. So was America’s desire to maintain a steady flow of cheap Middle Eastern oil into the tanks of its cars and the furnaces of its factories. But much more important was the impulse on the part of a group of thinkers turned policymakers to export American values of democracy, capitalism and the rule of law to the Muslim world. This group strongly believes that this project is feasible and must begin with Iraq.

By the time this article appears, America, in all probability, will have advanced further towards the threshold of the war in Iraq. No matter what happens after the first bombs start falling on Baghdad, we will see the birth of a new world order. The phrase “a new world order” has been used frequently and often unthinkingly. It has become a cliche behind which a great number of analysts can hide in order not to worry too much about the future. The use of the word “order” implies that nations and national interests will be neatly arranged. There is also an assumption that the world will follow rules, some of which will be laid down by the sole global superpower while some others will be based on consensus arrived at among nations around the globe.

What will be these rules? We, in Pakistan, must answer this question in order to shape our own foreign policy response. Such a response, as we have already underscored above, must serve our needs. Obtaining a steady flow of foreign finance is by far the most important of these needs. The country’s foreign policy must be fashioned to achieve that objective.

But let us go back to the new, post-Iraq-war, global order. This new order will have the countries subscribe — if not by choice then by force — to three basic sets of rules and principles: zero tolerance for the proliferation of weapons of mass murder and destruction; America’s right to act pre-emptively and, if need be, unilaterally; and the exercise of American leadership to move the rest of the world towards the social and political values it cherishes.

The United States has already laid down the marker that “any state it believes holds weapons of mass destruction and might conceivably become unstable or cooperate with terrorists, will be disarmed.”

How strongly President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative policy advisers feel about the weapons of mass destruction was revealed by Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in early March 2003 as America prepared itself for the war against Iraq. Gingrich said that the hesitation in stating the full extent of Bush’s world vision is “confusing” foreign countries. “The most powerful nation in the world must be understandable not merely formidable... I think history will record that a remarkably strong president happened to be in office at a juncture when weapons of mass destruction and terrorism rewrote all the rules of engagement in international relations. It will record that the president moved beyond old institutions and developed a new set of alliances.”

The United States, supported perhaps by Japan, Canada and the countries of Western Europe, will pressure such countries to disarm through the use of diplomacy, involving the United Nations or other multilateral forces. However, if the concerned countries are not prepared to follow that route, the United States, preferably with the backing of a “coalition of the willing,” will be prepared to use the overwhelming force available to them to bring about disarmament.

And, finally, a number of policymakers and policy-influencers in Washington are now certain that the only political system that will establish global peace has to be run on the basis of western liberalism. This has at least three aspects. First, people’s right to choose their own leaders. Second, the need for the leaders to resubmit themselves for elections on a periodic basis not too distant apart and in a manner which ensures the free exercise of the people’s will. Third, relations among the people and between the people and the government to be governed by a system of laws. In such a system laws will be made by the people’s elected representatives and enforced by an independent judiciary.

Only those countries that follow the basic rules which govern the new world order will be its respected members. Those who do not follow them with less than strict resolve will be kept at the margin of the new order. And those who move far away from pursuing these sets of beliefs — and by doing so pose a real danger to the rest of the world — will be brought into conformity by force. The countries that become good citizens of the new world will draw a tremendous amount of benefit from accessing the enormous amount of riches that are available to the core countries. It is obvious from this description of the emerging order and given Pakistan’s economic situation, that we have to belong to its core, not to its fringes.

The circling hawks

“TO be or not to be, that is the question.” This was Hamlet’s torment. To have a Security Council resolution authorizing war in Iraq or praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and let the cruise missiles fly.

There is agreement that Iraq must be disarmed. The possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussain poses a direct threat, not only to world peace but to Planet Earth. No serious thought is being given to whether he has weapons of mass destruction or if he has, how he acquired them, which specific countries launched him in the business of weapons of mass destruction. This has become irrelevant.

The world changed after 9/11, rendering null and void whatever transpired before that day of infamy. How it has changed is best illustrated by Lance Morrow, no peacenik he, in Time magazine. In his column, Lance Morrow who argues against trampling the US Constitution in the march against terrorism writes about a stupid incident at the Crossgates Mall in Guilderland, New York “where a 61-year-old lawyer and his son put on T-shirts that read ‘Peace on Earth’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance’, and were ordered by mall guards to remove the shirts or leave. The lawyer refused, and was charged with treason.” Treason! Peace on Earth is also the message of Christmas.

It is entirely possible that the military action against Iraq will have started by the time this column appears in print. Donald Rumsfeld has made it clear that he and the super-hawks around him had run out of patience even with Tony Blair.

Tim Sebastian of Hardtalk interviewed a Congressman from New York who was gung-ho about a military assault on Iraq. He asked him about the millions all over the world who were demonstrating against the war. The good Congressman who was extolling the virtues of democracy was of the considered opinion that the anti- war protesters were in the wrong and that sometimes leaders have to lead irrespective of the sentiments of the people.

The logical, follow-up question should have been: What is the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship? Tim Sebastian chose to let the Congressman off the hook. The Congressman did not seem concerned about the certainty of thousands being killed but he spared a thought about Americans and particularly his constituents who might get killed. About France, he said that Churchill and Roosevelt had gifted the veto to it, to keep alive the fiction that France had played a role in winning World War- 2. In days gone by, one would have dismissed the Congressman as belonging to the lunatic-fringe but he appeared to be more moderate in his views than, say, John Howard, the prime minister of Australia and while school-children were taking out anti-war processions in Australia, this prime minister was talking about Saddam Hussain gouging the eyes out of a four year boy in order to get a confession from the boy’s father and expressing his horror at the prospect of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. The Americans want Iraq’s oil and the terrorists want its weapons of mass destruction. Everyone seems to want something from Iraq. John Howard too has become a righteous warrior, Crocodile Dundee.

Donald Rumsfeld has already dismissed France and Germany as being Old Europe. Presumably, this is to mean that these two countries have become obsolete. Britain has not yet been chucked into this category. Tony Blair is out there fighting the good fight even as the opposition to the war becomes more strident and he faces a revolt in his own party. Perhaps the people of Britain can be condemned as old Europeans and Tony Blair’s government, those who are not on the verge of bolting, can still be considered relevant.

Noam Chomsky in a booklet Media Control makes the point forcefully: “The issue is whether we want to live in free society or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self- imposed totalitarianism, with the bewildered herd marginalized, directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming patriotic slogans, fearing for their lives, and admiring with awe the leader who saved them for destruction, while the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they’re supposed to repeat and the society deteriorates at home.

We end up serving as a Mercenary Enforcer State, hoping that others are going to pay us to smash up the world.” All arguments for a war on Iraq started from a fixed, ideological premise: Our cause is just. Because there is a tacit acceptance of this premise that diplomacy seems to be going round and round, going through Blix’s report like an auditor, looking for the fine-print that may prove the case or provide escape clauses.

The demand of the British in their amended second resolution that Saddam Hussain should go on television and address his people in Arabic and admit to his guilt is arrogant beyond words as it is absurd. This was quickly withdrawn but it goes to the mindset that it was at all inserted, so brazenly, so recklessly.

There is a strong case for disarming Saddam Hussain. There is a far more compelling case for disarming Israel. Ariel Sharon has shown that he has no qualms about killing men, women and children. Israel too is in material breach of Security Council resolutions. Why is no voice being raised to get compliance? There is no moral case against Saddam Hussain if we are unwilling to apply the same standards to Israel.

What will happen to those millions of anti-war demonstrators once the military action begins in Iraq? Will their protests have gone in vain? Not entirely. There may be little or no consolation for those who will be killed and not much for their families. But it may be more difficult for those leaders who led the pro-war cheering section to salvage their reputations.

I would imagine that Tony Blair will come out badly bruised no matter what happens. His political career may well be the first casualty of the Iraq war. George Bush Jr. too might find political life difficult once there is no Saddam Hussain to kick around any more. Even more, if the price of petrol does not go down.

Politics of Indian Muslims

CONFRONTED with the politics of militant Hindu nationalism, Muslims in India appear to be moving out of mainstream politics and (being driven) into a shell of their own. At a gathering of about 75,000 Muslims drawn from several northern Indian states, Muslim leaders decided to form a political party of their own.

The moving spirit behind the meeting was Imam Ahmad Bukhari of Delhi’s Jama Masjid, closely supported by Maulana Asad Madni, one-time head of the famed Darul Uloom of Deoband, the leading Muslim seminary of the subcontinent.

The Deoband Darul Uloom has been a nursery of traditional Muslim clerics and the fountainhead of a large number of conservative madrassahs functioning in the subcontinent. Earlier, Maulana Asad Madni was strongly supportive of the nationalist policies of the Congress led by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and later his daughter, Mrs Indira Gandhi. However, he distanced himself from Mrs Gandhi following the forced family planning strategy of her son, Sanjay Gandhi, and his attempt to clear a part of old Delhi of its Muslim slums by use of force.

This marked the beginning of the Indian Muslims’ estrangement from the Congress. Maulana Asad Madni, then head of the Deoband seminary, withdrew his support to Mrs Gandhi’s government. Imam Bukhari’s father, Imam Abdullah Bukhari, even prevented municipal services being extended to the environs of Jama Masjid while the Congress was in power. This inevitably resulted in a certain amount of confusion and uncertainty in the politics of Indian Muslims. A large number of them began to identify themselves with the leadership of what the conservative Hindus regarded as lower-caste Hindu leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh.

The demolition of the historic Babri Masjid in December 1992 by a mob of Hindu zealots, when a Congress prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, headed the government in New Delhi, worsened the communal situation. The director-general of police in Madhya Pradesh at the time spoke of the “partisan attitude” of the police force at a recent seminar. Denying that the entire police force was “contaminated”, he conceded that there was “an increasing loss of faith of the people belonging to the minority community in the impartiality of the police forces.”

The blatantly anti-Muslim policies of the Vajpayee government have pushed the Indian Muslims to the wall and have virtually forced them to set up a political party of their own. Two recent developments have also contributed to the growing estrangement of the Indian Muslims from the mainstream politics. Firstly, the judicial verdict not to hand over the site of the demolished Babri Masjid to Muslims and to have the site excavated to determine whether a Hindu temple existed there.

The report by a Canadian survey team, commissioned by the Allahabad high court last December, has disclosed that buried below the site were “pillars, walls, a floor ad broken walls below the floor”, but does not date the structure. Nor does it indicate whether the excavated ruins are those of a palace, or a temple or a hall.

On top of the curious verdict of the Allahabad high court has come the hanging in the parliament of a portrait of the staunch Hindu fundamentalist leader, the late V.D. Savarkar, who died in 1966. Savarkar was fanatically anti-Muslim and was tried but acquitted as an accused in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Incidentally, Congress president Sonia Gandhi boycotted the function marking the hanging of Savarkar’s portrait in the parliament. According to India Today she did this apparently under the influence the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and “a group of Delhi historians.” The historians had “dubbed” the hanging of Savarkar’s portrait as “a disgrace” and described the deceased Hindu leader as “anti-national.”

Be that as it may, New Delhi cannot be indifferent to the implications of the estrangement of the Indian Muslims from the mainstream politics, seeking to set up a political party of their own. Significantly, speakers at the Delhi conclave stressed that the proposed Muslim political party will be “entirely secular” and its membership would also be open to lower-caste Hindus.

The Delhi meeting was attended among others by the veteran Congress leader Arjun Singh, besides former Union ministers Arif Mohammad Khan and Ram Vilas Paswan and Mirwaiz Omar Farooq of Kashmir’s All Parties Hurriyat Conference.

Imam ahmad Bukhari, speaking on the occasion, maintained that the past secular and regional parties had come to power with the help of Muslims but “they used Muslims only to gain power; we cannot accept their leadership.”

War clouds thicken

FINALLY, the long-expected war against Iraq, it seems, is about to begin. Five thousand or so people may die on the day it erupts, most of them Iraqi soldiers obliterated by the ‘shock and awe’ blitz of bombing with which the United States plans to begin the invasion.

The number of civilian and American casualties in subsequent days is less certain, as it depends on whether the Iraqi army makes a stand in the cities, but the United Nations relief agencies are planning for up to eighty thousand Iraqi dead. That’s quite a few people, but President George W. Bush has run out of patience.

He has waited for a long time, but that Saddam Hussein keeps turning and twisting, destroying a few missiles a day and occasionally producing a new document to prove to the United Nations inspectors that he really did destroy his chemical weapons twelve years ago. ‘Deception and delay’, Mr. Bush calls it, and he has had enough of it. It’s time to stop the nonsense and start the war.

He’s not too happy with his friends and allies, either. They’re also into delay, from the French, Russians, Germans and Pakistanis who keep insisting that the inspectors must be given time to do their job to the sly Canadians, who have been playing their usual slippery game of trying to broker a ‘compromise’ resolution at the United Nations. They all argue that it is unwise to abandon collective security and let one country attack another preemptively, as if a US attack on Iraq without UN backing (which it is very unlikely to get in the next week) were setting a bad example.

Canada’s Prime Minister Jean Chretien went so far as to worry that other countries might start playing by the new US rules: “China might say, ‘Well, we have a problem somewhere, and we don’t like the regime, and we’re going to change the regime.’” Don’t these people understand that international law is only there to restrain the bad countries, not to hamper the good ones? How can any self-respecting democratic superpower let itself be Gulliverised by these pygmies? They don’t understand how urgent this is.

Only there’s a nagging little question in many people’s minds. Why wasn’t it urgent to sort Iraq out a year and a bit ago, when President Bush first nominated Saddam Hussein’s fiefdom as lead villain in the ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union speech on 29 January, 2002? If the man is that dangerous, why did the Bush administration do absolutely nothing about him then? Why did the great debate on ‘the war’ begin only last September, when (by sheer coincidence) it diverted public attention from tedious domestic issues like the recession and corporate scandals during the campaign for the mid-term Congressional elections in November? And why did the US not start to call up reservists and move major military units towards the Gulf until after the elections were over?

Saddam Hussein, if you believe the Bush administration, is not just another Middle Eastern dictator weaving his bloody way through the shoal waters of the region’s cut-throat politics. He is a maniac with a fanatical hatred of the United States (and never mind the fact that he was quite cheerfully allied to the US during the 1980s). He has ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and might give them to Islamist terrorists for use against the United States (though the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief inspector, Mohammed El Baradei, says there has been no Iraqi nuclear weapons programme since 1991, and the Islamists constantly call for Saddam’s overthrow).

Well, then, he has chemical and biological weapons — not currently in production, perhaps, but he surely has some hidden away from the 1980s war with Iran, when he relied on US-supplied aerial and satellite intelligence to drench Iranian trenches with nerve gas. (Q.: Mr President, how can you be sure that Saddam Hussein has chemical and biological weapons? A.: We kept the receipts.) Only these are the sort of weapons that any halfway-competent terrorist organisation can make in its own labs. — Copyright

The most unpopular war in recent history

THE Bush administration’s relentless unilateral march towards war is profoundly disturbing for many reasons, but so far as American citizens are concerned, the whole grotesque show is a tremendous failure in democracy. An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public pressure, and simply turned on its head. It is no exaggeration to say that this war is the most unpopular in modern history.

Before the war has begun there have been more people protesting against it in the United States alone than was the case at the height of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Note also that those rallies took place after the war had been going on for several years: this one has yet to begin, even though a large number of overtly aggressive and belligerent steps have already been taken by the US and its loyal puppy, the UK government of the increasingly ridiculous Tony Blair.

I have been criticized recently for my anti-war position by illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defence of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba’athi Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait in 1985, when in an open conversation with the then minister of education, Hassan Al-Ibrahim, I accused him and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their financial support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud to have committed billions of dollars to Saddam’s war against “the Persians”, as they were then contemptuously called, and that it was a more important struggle than someone like me could comprehend.

And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of US imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more later), and am therefore unable to appreciate their nobility of soul. Little notice is taken of the fact that barely a week after extolling President Bush’s commitment to democracy Professor Makiya is now denouncing the US and its plans for a post-Saddam military-Ba’athi government in Iraq. When individuals get into the habit of switching the gods whom they worship politically, there’s no end to the number of changes they make before they finally come to rest in utter disgrace and well deserved oblivion.

But to return to the US and its current actions. In all my encounters and travels I have yet to meet a person who is for the war. Even worse, most Americans now feel that this mobilization has already gone too far to stop, and that we are on the verge of a disaster for the country. Consider first of all that the Democratic Party, with few exceptions, has simply gone over to the president’s side in a gutless display of false patriotism.

Wherever you look in the Congress there are the tell-tale signs either of the Zionist lobby, the right-wing Christians, or the military-industrial complex — three inordinately influential minority groups who share hostility to the Arab world, unbridled support for extremist Zionism, and an insensate conviction that they are on the side of the angels.

Every one of the 500 congressional districts in this country has a defence industry in it, so that war has been turned into a matter of jobs, not of security. But, one might well ask: how does running an unbelievably expensive war remedy, for instance, economic recession, the almost certain bankruptcy of the social security system, a mounting national debt, and a massive failure in public education?

Demonstrations are looked at simply as a kind of degraded mob action, while the most hypocritical lies pass for absolute truth, without criticism and without objection. The media has simply become a branch of the war effort. What has entirely disappeared from television is anything remotely resembling a consistently dissenting voice. Every major channel now employs retired generals, former CIA agents, terrorism experts and known neo-conservatives as “consultants” who speak a revolting jargon designed to sound authoritative but in effect supporting everything done by the US — from the UN to the sands of Arabia.

Only one major daily newspaper (in Baltimore) has published anything about US eavesdropping, telephone tapping and message interception of the six small countries that are members of the Security Council and whose votes are undecided. There are no anti-war voices to read or hear in any of the major media of this country, no Arabs or Muslims (who have been consigned en masse to the ranks of the fanatics and terrorists of this world), no critics of Israel, not on public broadcasting, not in The New York Times, the New Yorker, US News and World Report, CNN and the rest. When these organizations mention Iraq’s flouting of 17 UN resolutions as a pretext for war, the 64 resolutions flouted by Israel(with US support) are never mentioned. Nor is the enormous human suffering of the Iraqi people during the past 12 years mentioned.

Whatever the dreaded Saddam has done Israel and Sharon have also done with American support, yet no one says anything about the latter while fulminating about the former. This makes a total mockery of taunts by Bush and others that the United Nations should abide by its own resolutions. The American people have thus been deliberately lied to, their interests cynically misrepresented and misreported, the real aims and intentions of this private war of Bush and his junta concealed with complete arrogance.

Never mind that Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle, all of them unelected officials who work for unelected Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, have for some time openly advocated Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the cessation of the Oslo process, have called for war against Iraq(and later Iran), and the building of more illegal Israeli settlements in their capacity (during Netanyahu’s successful campaign for prime minister in 1996) as private consultants to him, and that that has become US policy now.

Never mind that Israel’s iniquitous policies against Palestinians, which are reported only at the ends of articles (when they are reported at all) as so many miscellaneous civilian deaths, are never compared with Saddam’s crimes, which they match or in some cases exceed, all of them, in the final analysis, paid for by the US taxpayer without consultation or approval. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been wounded seriously in the last two years, and about 2,500 killed wantonly by Israeli soldiers who are instructed to humiliate and punish an entire people during what has become the longest military occupation in modern history.

Never mind that not a single critical Arab or Muslim voice has been seen or heard on the major American media, liberal, moderate, or reactionary, with any regularity at all since the preparations for war have gone into their final phase. Consider also that none of the major planners of this war, certainly not the so-called experts like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, neither of whom has so much as lived in or come near the Arab world in decades, nor the military and political people like Powell, Rice, Cheney, or the great god Bush himself, know anything about the Muslim or Arab worlds beyond what they see through Israeli or oil company or military lenses, and therefore have no idea what a war of this magnitude against Iraq will produce for the people actually living there.

And consider too the sheer, unadorned hubris of men like Wolfowitz and his assistants. Asked to testify to a largely somnolent Congress about the war’s consequences and costs, they are allowed to escape without giving any concrete answers, which effectively dismisses the evidence of the army chief of staff who has spoken of a military occupation force of 400,000 troops for 10 years at a cost of almost a trillion dollars.

Democracy traduced and betrayed, democracy celebrated but in fact humiliated and trampled on by a tiny group of men who have simply taken charge of this republic as if it were nothing more than, what, an Arab country? It is right to ask who is in charge since clearly the people of the United States are not properly represented by the war this administration is about to loose on a world already beleaguered by too much misery and poverty to endure more. And Americans have been badly served by a media controlled essentially by a tiny group of men who edit out anything that might cause the government the slightest concern or worry.

As for the demagogues and servile intellectuals who talk about war from the privacy of their fantasy worlds, who gave them the right to connive in the immiseration of millions of people whose major crime seems to be that they are Muslims and Arabs? What American, except for this small unrepresentative group, is seriously interested in increasing the world’s already ample stores of anti-Americanism? Hardly any I would suppose.

Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour.—Copyright Edward W. Said

The writer is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, and a renowned author.