22 - 28 February 2001
Issue No.522
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 February 2001 Issue No.522 |
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Reflections
An all-American dream
Why are the Americans so shabby in their treatment of their "friends" in this particular corner of the global empire? Notwithstanding the CIA's concerns about restive "youth bulges" in the Arab world, Washington seems bent on destabilising its Arab allies, and worse.
To what aim? It's enough to give the "friends" a positive persecution complex. The "rogues" have been so beaten to the ground by deliberate action and by historical circumstances they cut very comic figures when presented (whether by the US or by themselves) as a "threat" to US/Israeli interests in the region. The "moderates," on the other hand, have been bled dry of concessions and assurances of loyalty. Mind you, this is not a question of lack of communication (among friends). In Camp David and till the very eve of Sharon's election, Arafat was telling anyone who would listen, most notably the CIA's youth-bulge-concerned Tanner, that the concessions demanded of him would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. America's allies have been at great pains to explain to their friends and patrons in Washington that the Arabs' cup of humiliation has run over, and that the indignities heaped upon the regimes and peoples of the region are calling forth the presumably shared horror of the "Islamic threat."
None of this seems to make much of an impression, however, either on the various White House residents and their men, or, a fortiori, on the lawmakers in Congress. Bush Jr's oil-and-armaments cronies are already proving as sensitive to their Arab friends' dilemma as Clinton's arch-Zionist lot were. One obvious reason for such callous disregard is that, deep down, the people in Washington are convinced that the so-called Islamic threat is more bogus than real. This, I believe, is an accurate assessment. Under the fashionable cultural-essence disguise, today's Islamists are yesterday's Arab nationalists, but mutated -- with all the faults (magnified) and none of the attributes, ergo Saddam Hussein's reincarnation as caliph in bombed-back-to-the-Middle-Ages Baghdad.
So the boys in Washington are lying through their teeth when they rant about the threat of Islamic terrorism, Saddam, Gaddafi or Sudan's Al-Bashir. Nevertheless, this does not explain the lengths to which they are willing to go to humiliate the Arabs and embarrass their alleged pals and allies in the region.
Observe the timing of Bush Jr's first Middle East "initiative" (Britain's Blair is irrelevant now as ever -- whether it's "third way" Democrats or "right-wing conspiracy" Republicans in the White House, he happily does what he is told). An acknowledged war criminal has just won the premiership in Israel. He is forming a cabinet straight out of the Arabs' worst nightmare, a grim Zionist monolith that leaves not the slightest room for illusion; one great big happy Zionist family, stretching all the way from the Arabs' pet dove, Peres (who remembers Qana anyway?), to a couple of frothing-at-the-mouth genocidal maniacs with freakish dreams of wiping out half of Egypt's 60 million people by bombing the High Dam. Nearly ten years after Madrid, the peace process has been declared over and done with. There shall be no "final and lasting" Arab-Israeli peace. Israel is to have a war cabinet, and the whole region seems to be hanging over a precipice of apocalyptic violence.
And Bush Jr goes and bombs Baghdad.
If only to underline the linkage, the allegedly "routine" bombing of the beleaguered Arab capital is to be followed soon after by joint US-Israeli Patriot missile exercises, also "routine."
Such breezy disregard for the stability and, at the very least, medium-term survival prospects of America's friends in the Arab world seems, at first glance, totally bewildering -- even more so now that the AIPAC crowd is out of the White House, having been replaced by the Arabs' alleged friends in the oil industry. The point, of course, is that in today's US, one does not need to be Jewish to be a Zionist, as Edward Said has so clearly illustrated in his series of articles on Zionism in America. It is not that the "Zionist lobby" has become all-powerful in America, but that Zionism, in ideology and practice, has become the most accurate expression of America's imperial self-image and needs in a post-Cold War, globalised and globalising world. No other ideology and practice seems to both embody and epitomise the arrogance of power, the arbitrary and unchecked dispensing of violence, the unequivocally racist contempt for the oppressed and the heartless denial of their most fundamental rights, that appear more and more to be essential requisites of US-led capitalist globalisation -- at so little cost, and so successfully.
Meanwhile, not a single reassuring illusion is left for the Arab "realists" to lean on.
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