This is a report from the battlefield, not that on the warfront in Iraq but that in the public debate at home.
The United States sends its shocking and awesome military might to our part of the world to bring about not just regime change but region change as well, all the while proclaiming, as it sets about regrouping our geopolitical reality in response to its interests, that American troops here will not be an army of occupation but of liberation, as if we had asked to be liberated.
Sure, Arab commentators can focus on how egregious, hypocritical and ultimately dangerous that imperial foray is. But what is the point of preaching to the already converted? We know what America is, or what it has become over the last century — a superpower like any other in human history, from imperial Rome to colonial Britain, that conducts its foreign policy without a politico-moral impulse. So why blame the beast of prey for being a beast of prey?
If our goal is to get a cheap thrill out of knocking the US for its blatancy, then so be it. But I for one have had enough cheap thrills, since the late 1950s, to last me for the rest of my lifetime. Enough, as it were, of the firebrand leading the firebrand.
Rather, the question I raise today is not why a superpower is tearing our homeland asunder, but why it feels able to do that, and get away with it.
Why, after well over half-a-century of independence, do we remain so weak, so helpless at meeting the challenges of history, of modernity, of progress? So vulnerable to the whims of invaders who know they can ravage our land, at will, without fear of retribution?
Why has our political culture proven so barren, our public debate so dreary, our reflections on national selfhood so desperately monotonous?
Begin here: We in the Arab world have quietly acquiesced in the forfeiture of our powers of self-determination as individuals and, collectively, as a polity.
We have lived in societies where a handful of men dictate our destiny, where we are socialized on the ethic of fear — fear of innovation and originality — and are coerced into embracing orthodoxy and uniformity. So much so that we have become a mirror image of our authoritarian elite, and like them, living in deep denial, incapable of grasping reality.
The strength of a culture derives from the freedom of citizens to speak freely and openly, to engage in the kind of discourse where all are entitled, even encouraged, to express diverse views that would challenge the conventional wisdom of ruling elites.
When members of a whole community are told that they must express no criticism of a leader, that they must stand by him through thick and thin, right or wrong, they in effect are not only forfeiting their human rights, but contributing to the perpetuation of a broken-down society, shorn of its social capital.
A society that dumps a citizen in jail for 20 years for dissenting with a leader or tortures an intellectual because the authorities disagree with his views is not only broken down, but is broken in back and spirit.
A society, in other words, where adversarial thinkers have their heads hit when they are lifted and their voices silenced when they are raised or that hounds its most talented figures into exile is vacuous at its civilizational core.
In short, we are talking about a society that is fair game for assault on it by outsiders.
How do you expect such a polity, that enlists instruments of violence to destroy the shaping powers of the literary, social and political imagination, that reduces the flow of ideas to nebulous jargon, to present itself to the world as a credible discussant in the global dialogue of cultures or as a credible threat to the life and limb of invaders?
American troops would not have come to our part of the world — swinging their big egos around, and, in the words of President Bush, bringing a “decisive force” that will “accept no outcome but victory” — if they had not known that they could blast their way into that crushed corner of the world that we inhabit.
And talk about a beast of prey. The Iraqi representative at the UN may have been right in his choice of metaphor last Wednesday when he said that the US was going by “the law of the jungle.” When a beast of prey goes on the hunt, it knows instinctively which in the herd is weakest before it pounces on it.
As we go about pondering this latest catastrophe in our homeland, we should begin by asking if there is a lesson in all of this for us.
Arab News Opinion 27 March 2003
