long piece by Edward Said posted by Bob Simmons and forwarded to me

[Michael Eisenstadt]

I hope someone will forward this to Eisenswine.
das teleBS

August 20, 2003

The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Dreams and Delusions By EDWARD SAID

During the last days of July, Representative Tom Delay 
(Republican) of Texas, the House majority leader and 
described routinely as one of the three or four most 
powerful men in Washington, delivered himself of his 
opinions regarding the roadmap and the future of peace 
in the Middle East. What he had to say was meant as an 
announcement for a trip he subsequently took to Israel 
and several Arab countries where, it is reported, he 
articulated the same message. In no uncertain terms, 
Delay declared himself opposed to the Bush 
Administration's support for the roadmap, especially 
the provision in it for a Palestinian state. "It 
would be a terrorist state" he said emphatically, 
using the word "terrorist" as has become habitual in 
official American discourse without regard for 
circumstance, definition, or concrete characteristics. 
He went on to add that he came by his ideas concerning
Israel by virtue of what he described as his 
convictions as a "Christian Zionist," a phrase 
synonymous not only with support for everything Israel
does, but also for the Jewish state's theological 
right to go on doing what it does regardless whether 
or not a few million "terrorist" Palestinians get hurt 
in the process. The sheer number of people in the 
southwestern United States who think like Delay is an 
imposing 60-70 million and, it should be noted, 
included among them is none other than George W. Bush, 
who is also an inspired born-again Christian for whom 
everything in the Bible is meant to be taken literally.
Bush is their leader and surely depends on their votes 
for the 2004 election which, in my opinion, he will 
not win. And because his presidency is threatened by 
his ruinous policies at home and abroad, he and his 
campaign strategists are trying to attract more 
Christian right-wingers from other parts of the 
country, the Middle West especially. Altogether then, 
the views of the Christian Right (allied with the 
ideas and lobbying power of the rabidly pro-Israeli 
neo-conservative movement) constitute a formidable 
force in domestic American politics, which is the 
domain where, alas, the debate about the Middle East 
takes place in America. One must always remember 
that in America, Palestine and Israel are regarded 
as local, not foreign policy, matters. Thus, were 
Delay's pronouncements simply to have been either 
the personal opinions of a religious enthusiast or 
the dreamlike ramblings of an inconsequential 
visionary, one could dismiss them quickly as 
nonsense. But in fact, they represent a language 
of power that is not easily opposed in America, 
where so many citizens believe themselves to be 
guided directly by God in what they see and 
believe, and sometimes do. John Ashcroft, the
Attorney General, is reported to begin each 
working day in his office with a collective prayer 
meeting. Fine, people want to pray, they are 
constitutionally allowed total religious liberty. 
But in Delay's case, by saying what he has said 
against an entire race of people, the 
Palestinians, that they would constitute a whole 
country of "terrorists," that is, enemies of 
humankind in the current Washington definition of 
the word, he has seriously hampered their 
progress toward self-determination, and gone 
some way in imposing further punishment and 
suffering on them, all on religious grounds. By 
what right? Consider the sheer inhumanity and 
imperialist arrogance of Delay's position: from 
a powerful eminence ten thousand miles away, 
people like him, who are as ignorant about the 
actual life of Arab Palestinians as the man in 
the moon, can actually rule against and delay 
Palestinian freedom, and assure years more of 
oppression and suffering, just because he 
thinks they are all terrorists and because his 
own Christian Zionism--where neither proof nor
reason counts for very much--tells him so. So, 
in addition to the Israeli lobby here, to say 
nothing of the Israeli government there, 
Palestinian men, women and children have to 
endure more obstacles and more roadblocks placed
in their way in the US Congress. Just like that.

What also struck me about the Delay comments 
wasn't only their irresponsibility and their 
easy, uncivilized (a word very much in use
concerning the war against terrorism) dismissal 
of thousands of people who have done him no 
wrong whatever, but also the unreality, the 
delusional unreality his statements share with 
so much of official Washington so far as 
discussions of (and policy toward) the Middle 
East, the Arabs and Islam are concerned. This 
has reached new levels of intense, and even 
inane abstraction in the period since the 
events of September 11. Hyperbole, the 
technique of finding more and more excessive 
statements to describe and over-describe a 
situation, has ruled the public realm, 
beginning of course with Bush himself, whose 
metaphysical statements about good and evil, 
the axis of evil, the light of the almighty 
and his endless, dare I call them sickening 
effusions about the evils of terrorism, have 
taken language about human history and 
society to new, dysfunctional levels of 
pure, ungrounded polemic. All of this laced 
with solemn sermons and declarations to the 
rest of the world to be pragmatic, to avoid 
extremism, to be civilized and rational, 
even as US policy makers with untrammeled 
executive power can legislate the change of 
regime here, an invasion there, a 
"re-construction" of a country there, all 
from within the confines of their plush
air-conditioned Washington offices. Is this 
a way of setting standards for civilized 
discussion and advancing democratic values, 
including the very idea of democracy itself?

One of the basic themes of all Orientalist 
discourse since the mid-19thcentury is that 
the Arabic language and the Arabs are 
afflicted with both a mentality and a 
language that has no use for reality. Many 
Arabs have come to believe this racist 
drivel, as if whole national languages like 
Arabic, Chinese, or English directly 
represent the minds of their users. This 
notion is part of the same ideological 
arsenal used in the 19th century to justify
colonial oppression: "Negroes" can't speak 
properly therefore, according to Thomas 
Carlyle, they must remain enslaved; "the 
Chinese" language is complicated and 
therefore, according to Ernest Renan, the 
Chinese man or woman is devious and 
should be kept down; and so on and so 
forth. No one takes such ideas seriously 
today, except for when Arabs, Arabic, and
Arabists are concerned. In a paper he 
wrote a few years ago, Francis Fukuyama, 
the right wing pontificator and 
philosopher who was briefly celebrated 
for his preposterous "end of history" 
idea, said that the State Department was 
well rid of its Arabists and Arabic 
speakers because by learning that 
language they also learned the 
"delusions" of the Arabs. Today, every 
village philosopher in the media, 
including pundits like Thomas Friedman, 
chatters on in the same vein, adding in 
their scientific descriptions of the Arabs 
that one of the many delusions of Arabic 
is the commonly held "myth" that the 
Arabs have of themselves as a people. 
According to such authorities as 
Friedman and Fouad Ajami, the Arabs are 
simply a loose collection of vagrants, 
tribes with flags, masquerading as a 
culture and a people. One might point 
out that that itself is a 
hallucinatory Orientalist delusion, 
which has the same status as the Zionist 
belief that Palestine was empty, and that 
the Palestinians were not there and 
certainly don't count as a people. One 
scarcely needs to argue against the 
validity of such assumptions, so 
obviously do they derive from fear and 
ignorance. But that is not all. Arabs 
are always being berated for their 
inability to deal with reality, to 
prefer rhetoric to facts, to wallow 
in self-pity and self-aggrandizing 
rather than in sober recitals of the 
truth. The new fashion is to refer 
to the UNDP Report of last year as 
an "objective" account of Arab 
self-indictment. Never mind that the 
Report, as I have pointed out, is a 
shallow and insufficiently reflective 
social science graduate student paper 
designed to prove that Arabs can tell 
the truth about themselves, and it is 
pretty far below the level of 
decades of Arab critical writing from 
the time of Ibn Khaldun to the present. 
All that is pushed aside, as is the 
imperial context which the UNDP authors 
blithely ignore, the better perhaps to 
prove that their thinking is in line 
with American pragmatism.

Other experts often say that, as a 
language, Arabic is imprecise and 
incapable of expressing anything with 
any real accuracy. In my opinions,
such observations are so ideologically 
mischievous as not to require argument. 
But I think we can get an idea of what 
drives such opinions forward by looking 
for an instructive contrast at one of 
the great successes of American 
pragmatism and how it shows how our 
present leaders and authorities deal 
with reality in sober and realistic 
terms. I hope the irony of what I am 
discussing will quickly be evident. The 
example I have in mind is American 
planning for post-war Iraq. There is a 
chilling account of this in the August 
4 issue of the Financial Times in which 
we are informed that Douglas Feith and 
Paul Wolfowitz, unelected officials 
who are among the most powerful of the 
hawkish neo-conservatives in the Bush 
Administration with exceptionally close 
ties to Israel's Likud Party, ran a 
group of experts in the Pentagon "who 
all along felt that this [the war and 
its aftermath] was not just going to 
be a cakewalk [a slang term for 
something so easy to do that little 
effort would be needed], it [the whole 
thing] was going to be 60-90 days, a 
flip-over and hand-off to Chalabi and 
the Iraqi National Council. The 
Department of Defense could then wash 
its hands of the whole affair and 
depart quickly, smoothly, and swiftly. 
And there would be a democratic Iraq 
that was amenable to our wishes and 
desires left in its wake. And that's 
all there was to it." We now know, of 
course, that the war was indeed fought 
on these premises and Iraq militarily 
occupied on just those totally 
far-fetched imperialist assumptions. 
Chalabi's record as informant and banker 
is, after all, not of the best. And now, 
no one needs to be reminded of what has 
happened in Iraq since the fall of 
Saddam Hussein. The terrible shambles, 
from the looting and pillaging of 
libraries and museums (which is 
absolutely the responsibility of the 
US military as occupying power), the 
total breakdown of the infra-structure, 
the hostility of Iraqis--who are not 
after all a homogenous single group--
to Anglo-American forces, the 
insecurity and shortages of daily life 
in Iraq, and above all, the 
extraordinary human--I emphasize the 
word "human"--incompetence of Garner, 
Bremer and all their minions and 
soldiers, in adequately addressing the 
problems of post-war Iraq, all this 
testifies to the kind of ruinous sham 
pragmatism and realism of American 
thinking which is supposed to be in 
sharp contrast to that of lesser, 
pseudo-peoples like the Arabs who are 
full of delusions and a faulty language 
to boot. The truth of the matter is 
that reality is neither at the 
individual's command (no matter how 
powerful) nor does it necessarily 
adhere more closely to some peoples and 
mentalities than to others. The human 
condition is made up of experience and 
interpretation, and those can never be 
completely dominated by power: they are 
also the common domain of human beings 
in history. The terrible mistakes made by 
Wolfowitz and Feith came down to their 
arrogant substitution of abstract and 
finally ignorant language for a far more 
complex and recalcitrant reality. The 
appalling results are still before us.

So let us not accept any longer the 
ideological demagoguery that leaves
language and reality as the sole 
property of American power, or of 
so-called Western perspectives. The core 
of the matter is of course imperialism, 
that (in the end banal) self-assumed 
mission to rid the world of evil figures
like Saddam in the name of justice and 
progress. Revisionist justifications
of the invasion of Iraq and the American 
war on terrorism that have become one of 
the least welcome imports from an earlier 
failed empire, Britain, and have 
coarsened discourse and distorted fact and 
history with alarming fluency, is 
proclaimed by expatriate British 
journalists in America who don't have the 
honesty to say straight out, yes, we are 
superior and reserve the right to teach 
the natives a lesson anywhere in the 
world where we perceive them to be nasty 
and backward. And why do we have that 
right? Because those wooly-haired natives 
whom we know from having ruled our empire
for 500 years and now want America to follow, 
have failed: they fail to understand our 
superior civilization, they are addicted 
to superstition and fanaticism, they are 
unregenerate tyrants who deserve 
punishment, and we, by god, are the ones 
to do the job, in the name of progress 
and civilization. If some of these fickle 
journalistic acrobats (who have served so 
many masters that they don't have any moral 
bearings at all) can also manage to quote 
Marx and German scholars--despite their 
avowed anti-Marxism and their rank ignorance 
of any languages or scholarship not English
--in their favor, then how much cleverer 
they seem. It's just racism at bottom 
though, no matter how dressed up it is.

The problem is actually a deeper and more 
interesting one than the polemicists and 
publicists for American power have imagined. 
All over the world people are all 
experiencing the quandary of a revolution in 
thought and vocabulary in which American 
neo-liberalism and "pragmatism" are made on 
the one hand by American policy-makers to 
stand for a universal norm, whereas in fact
--as we have seen in the Iraq example I cited 
above--there are all sorts of slippages and 
double standards in the use of words like 
"realism," "pragmatism," and other words like 
"secular" and "democracy" and "pragmatism" 
that need complete re-thinking and 
re-evaluation. Reality is too complex and 
multifarious to lend itself to jejune 
formulae like "a democratic Iraq amenable 
to us would result." Such reasoning cannot 
stand the test of reality. Meanings are not 
imposed from one culture on to another, any 
more than one language and one culture alone 
possesses the secret of how to get things done 
efficiently. As Arabs, I would submit, and 
as Americans we have too long allowed a few
much-trumpeted slogans about "us" and "our" 
way to do the work of discussion, argument, 
and exchange. One of the major failures of 
most Arab and Western intellectuals today is 
that they have accepted without debate or 
rigorous scrutiny terms like secularism and 
democracy, as if everyone knew what those 
words meant. America today has the largest 
prison population of any country on earth; 
it also has the largest number of executions 
than any country in the world. To be elected 
President, you need not win the popular vote, 
but you must spend over 200 million dollars. 
How do these things pass the test of "liberal 
democracy?" So rather than have the terms of 
debate organized without skepticism around
a few sloppy terms like "democracy" and 
"liberalism" or around unexamined 
conceptions of "terrorism", "backwardness," 
and "extremism," we should be pressing for a 
more exacting, a more demanding kind of 
discussion in which terms are defined from 
numerous viewpoints and are always placed in 
concrete historical circumstances. The 
great danger is that American "magical"
thinking à la Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush is 
being passed off as the supreme standard for 
all peoples and languages to follow. In my 
opinion, and if Iraq is a salient example, 
then we must not allow that simply to occur 
without strenuous debate and probing analysis, 
and we mustn't be cowed into believing that 
Washington's power is so irresistibly awesome. 
And so far as the Middle East is concerned, 
the discussion must include Arabs and Muslims
and Israelis and Jews as equal participants. 
I urge everyone to join in and not leave the 
field of values, definitions, and cultures 
uncontested. They are certainly not the 
property of a few Washington officials, any 
more than they are the responsibility of a 
few Middle Eastern rulers. There is a common 
field of human undertaking being created and 
recreated, and no amount of imperial bluster 
can ever conceal or negate that fact.

Edward Said is a professor at Columbia University. 
He is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's 
forthcoming book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism 
(AK Press).

(c) Edward W. Said, 2003.

This article may be reproduced only with the 
permission of the author.