Cairo Post

"115 bridges were bombed. What did that have to do with Kuwait?"

Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon talked to Charlie Rose on the five year anniversary of the Iraq war and immediately turned the conversation back to Kuwait, sanctions and the 1990s. He pierced through the current rhetorical stasis of Sunni-Shi’a, of benchmarks, and of blaming Iraqis to the "material reality" of America’s first destruction of Iraq in 1991 and the subsequent decade of sanctions that killed maybe a million, kept the country’s infrastructure ruined, expanded the Iraqi diaspora and plainly convinced Iraqis that the Americans were not interested in liberation when they invaded in 2003.

He was searing in his criticisms, as he attacked "amnesia" in this country about the American-made devastation of Iraq before it was invaded. He explained to Rose that the myriad Iraqi uprisings which followed Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait and which were not supported by the United States were mixed and wide-ranging. They did not fit into exclusive frames broken down into religious groups — the favorite sought-after media explanation for any violence in Iraq and the Middle East today. After all, as he explained, there was an uprising in 16 of the 18 provinces of Iraq, from the Shia holy cities to "mixed" Baghdad and even Saddam’s home province of Tikrit.

The seemingly ignored recent history of America’s complicity in destroying Iraq before the jingoes launched shock-and-awe is vital to any view of Iraq in 2008 and, while the point should seem obvious, it seems to escape most coverage on this anniversary. The mainstream focus is instead on a "what-if" timeline that looks at the mistakes of the past five years outside of the context of the 1990s, which indirectly serves to support the rationale of going to war in the first place.

A rough transcription of one of the interview’s best moments:

Antoon: The problem we have also in the discourse is all this talk about mistakes and what-not. The premise of the entire war is not questioned. Even if no mistakes were ever done, citizens need to understand that human beings by and large do not like to be occupied by foreigners, no matter what. And that was the case, so even if no mistakes would have been done, people would have said in a very short period of time, thank you, bye bye.

Rose: Okay, then that raises the question of whether you could have done it in a way that you did not create the idea of occupation. You created the idea of liberation, not occupation. Unless you say that’s not possible at all?

Antoon: It would have been impossible because the practices of the United States army and Pentagon reflect also a certain ideology and a way of looking at the Middle East and a way of looking at the past and its history. So, we don’t have time to go through all of that, but these mistakes are made. They are not side mistakes. They reflect the structure and the approach to the Middle East and to Iraq and to its history and this amnesia that I’m talking about.

Two of Antoon’s remarks have stuck with me all day. The first is his citing of a US general in 1991, that "we bombed them back to the pre-industrial age." It immediately brings to mind Arundhati Roy and her article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," which the New York Times refused to publish after 9/11.

"In America there has been rough talk of ‘bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age,'’" Roy wrote then. "Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way."

Iraq was half-way there after eight years of war with Iran — supported by the US — and farther down the road after Operation Desert Storm. The United States made sure it never recovered with sanctions through the 1990s, only to bomb the devastation all over again beginning in 2003, our five year anniversary. And Americans still wonder why there are insurgents.

The second quote from Antoon was in response to Rose asking what sort of conditions were needed for reconciliation: water, sanitation, the basic amenities of modern, unoccupied life. Antoon nodded but shot back: "It’s a crime after five years that electricity is not back to pre-war levels, because Saddam Hussein, who was a dictator I detested, was able to have electricity back in 45 days."

"So why is the United States not achieving that in five years? It’s not just miscalculation. That was never the priority."

Fredric Jameson wrote soon after 9/11 that one could say that the event had not yet fully happened.

Six and half years later, 9/11 has happened enough that the United States occupies Iraq and continues to bomb Afghanistan. There is a government tome that might signify 9/11’s happening, The 9/11 Commission Report, and it recommends, among other things, that "Americans should not be exempt from carrying biometric passports or otherwise enabling their identities to be securely verified when they enter the United States." So surely the event has happened, or why else would Americans need biometric passports?

But we don’t have those yet. Nor has the United States yet engaged "with its friends to develop a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists," like the Report also recommends. Jordan and Egypt, some of our closest friends in the Middle East, do the most brutal things to our captured terrorists, bearded men whom the CIA pick up in Europe and fly to Cairo or Amman to have their testicles electrocuted, and much worse, until a piece of uncorroborated knowledge can be extracted and, maybe, used in another government tome, like The 9/11 Commission Report.

The "problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship" have not been "confronted, openly," either, and yet Rudy Giuliani recently campaigned for president under the banner of what he did as mayor of New York when 9/11 happened. But without yet confronting the problems in our relationships with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, or with any other "terrorist sanctuary" to "engage the struggle of ideas," how did Giuliani campaign? Because we haven’t confronted those problems, 9/11 cannot have happened, fully — it has not reached its recommended end points, in the frame of the government’s tome.

But, then again, Giuliani had to drop out of the presidential race. He never really had much of a chance, after all pinning his hopes on what he did when 9/11 happened. He has made millions doing business in the Middle East since leaving office in New York, with Guiliani Partners LLC, apparently consulting in countries like Jordan, perhaps on how best to electrocute terrorists’ testicles. Does consulting on that make Rudy Giuliani sure that 9/11 has happened? As sure as he was in autumn 2001, when he oversaw the cleanup of the rubble of the World Trade Center, which burned for a hundred days?

One of this week’s short readings for "Literature of 9/11." 

I have been reluctant to comment on the recent ‘events’ because the event in question, as history, is incomplete and one can even say that it has not yet fully happened.

Obviously there are immediate comments one can make, in particular on the nauseating media reception, whose cheap pathos seemed unconsciously dictated by a White House intent on smothering the situation in sentiment in order to demonstrate the undemonstrable: namely, that ‘Americans are united as never before since Pearl Harbor.’ I suppose this means that they are united by the fear of saying anything that contradicts this completely spurious media consensus.

Historical events, however, are not punctual, but extend in a before and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves. It has, to be sure, been pointed out that the Americans created bin Laden during the Cold War (and in particular during the Soviet war in Afghanistan), and that this is therefore a textbook example of dialectical reversal. But the seeds of the event are buried deeper than that. They are to be found in the wholesale massacres of the Left systematically encouraged and directed by the Americans in an even earlier period. The physical extermination of the Iraqi and the Indonesian Communist Parties, although now historically repressed and forgotten, were crimes as abominable as any contemporary genocide. It is, however, only now that the results are working their way out into actuality, for the resultant absence of any Left alternative means that popular revolt and resistance in the Third World have nowhere to go but into religious and ‘fundamentalist’ forms.

As for the future, no one (presumably including our own Government) has any idea what the promised and threatened ‘war on terrorism’ might look like. But until we know that, we can have no satisfactory picture of the ‘events’ we imagine to have taken place on a single day in September. Despite this uncertainty, however, it is permitted to feel that the future holds nothing good for either side.

Fredric Jameson
North Carolina

11 September, the London Review of Books.

Reading Ted Swedenburg’s blog this afternoon — he is an anthropology professor teaching in Arkansas, focused on the Middle East but specifically obsessed with music and the stylistic adoption of the kufiya (or keffiyeh) — I came across this music video. It’s by an Iranian sister-duo called Abjeez ("Abjee" is Farsi slang for sister). They are based in Sweden. "DemoKracy" is a riff on the rhetoric and picture of preemptive war, justified by democratization and propagated on cable news. Best part: the English subtitles rolling along the bottom of the screen, like news alerts. 

I just had to read a chunk of the 9/11 Commission Report for my transnational literature seminar, "Literature of 9/11."

We’re supposed to be writing less dismissive, more imminent responses to the readings. Last week was The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud. Next week is more of the 9/11 Report. What I wrote last night, after also reading the assigned Arundhati Roy article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice":

I found the 9/11 Commission Report much easier to read as a comic book. Is it because I saw the day like most people did as picture, on the television and in news magazines? The comic, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, was done by two old illustrators and is available online at Slate. Its speech boxes are mostly pulled from the book. It reads like a graphic novel. Stan Lee says on the cover: "Never before have I seen a nonfiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation."

Who is reading this Report, which sounds often like David McCullough history writing. Too bad the figures are not older, like Washington or Teddy Roosevelt, some of McCullough’s usual characters. The narrative, based on the CIA and FBI’s corporate histories, provided in interviews and depositions and files, looks a lot like bin Laden does in the Graphic Adaptation: too phony, too much like the single villain, like it is the plot line of a Cold War serial. Where is Captain America?

Amazon.com describes the Graphic Adaptation as putting "at every American’s fingertips the most defining event of the century." Arundhati Roy writes in late September 2001 that 9/11 is a "monstrous calling card for a world gone horribly wrong." She does not say it is the defining event of the century. Instead she talks about the last two decades, from the previous century, and about America’s wars.

"The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank."

And the 500,000 Iraqi children dead from US sanctions and Madeleine Albright thinking it was "a very hard choice" but that "we think it is worth it."

In the Report there are strange metaphors provided by Sandy Berger and for some reason I imagine him in an office near the Capitol, or maybe in suburban Virginia, comparing counter-terrorism to muddy windshields for Lee Hamilton. There is the fear that this is set to script a national melodrama movie like "Pearl Harbor," which it will, thanks to Oliver Stone, with Nicholas Cage and "World Trade Center."

The Report’s readability reveals what it is trying to sell: the government providing the story, trying to prove it, laying some blame and defending itself.

"What is your position on Palestinian property rights?
- John Arthur Wills, 61, Oakland
Sen. McCain: There can be no secure future for the region without a secure Israel at peace with neighbors that recognize its right to exist. U.S. policy must ensure that Israel retains its qualitative military edge in the region. Only a strong Israel can have the confidence to strike a permanent peace with the Palestinians, a peace I will seek as President. But such a peace can only progress when Palestinians abandon terror as an instrument of policy and show a capacity for self-government."

 Via the Angry Arab.

My hometown of the Hub shrugged off the most annoying of Yankee boob chants back in 2004. Since 2002, Boston’s won five sports championships. But now all of the Hudson Valley’s fair-weather Giants fans, at a Yankee’s game this summer, have a new chant: "18-1!"

Finally, can you guess the last thing we heard as we were walking (OK, hustling) out of the stadium right after the final play? That’s right, it was the sound of euphoric Giants fans chanting, "Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one!" Yes, it’s safe to say the Boston-New York rivalry has been taken to new heights. As a tennis umpire would say, "Advantage, New York."

Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one! Eighteen and one!

I can still hear them. I will always hear them.

The point-on Sports Guy-nut Bill Simmons.  

Some architectural info on the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, which Nancy Pelosi visited on her recent diplomatic trip to the region.

She said little from Israel to Saudi, but you wouldn’t know that from the coverage in the States, projecting Benedict Arnold when a US politician not from the White House goes to the Middle East, unless it’s John McCain, callously resting sinking presidential hopes on a tour of a Baghdad market. So the speaker of the house wearing a headscarf in a splendid mosque in Damascus causes more of an outcry among the fringes in the States than a senator (Lindsey Graham) exclaiming "I got five rugs for five bucks!" as he tours a war zone market, under a full military entourage including Apache helicopters, to try and convince  Americans that Baghdad is safe and that McCain’s candidancy is as legitimate as the war.

To be more depressing, this Fox News clip.

I don’t know how much coverage this is getting in the States — on Monday, 34 constitutional amendments will go to vote by referendum, and this being Egypt, via vote-rigging and low turnout, they will pass. Among the controversial changes to the country’s constitution:

1.) Tight "anti-terror" laws that greatly expands surveillance and arrest ability. Like the Patriot Act in the States, only more thuggish.

2.) President Mubarak can dissolve parliament unilaterally, when he wants

3.) A new government-appointed election commission to "certify" results, finally cutting out that pain of an independent judiciary

4.) Banning political organization on religious lines, theoretically outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood once and for all

Listening to the frustrated opposition, the country seems on the verge of social disaster (the economy’s already accounted for). These will pass. There is another protest scheduled for Sunday, and the secular and religious opposition have somewhat joined together, as Mubarak’s amendments target all dissidents.

The US doesn’t care at all. Condoleeza Rice will probably skirt comment more than State Dept spokesman Sean McCormack did last week. The saddest point is that amid the cynicism, doubt and anger in the region when American set out to "free Iraq and its people" in 2003 were glimmers, if only for a moment, of some believing the hype. What else could you do?

Sec. Rice told a crowd at AUC two years ago “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.

Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

She will forget she said that in Aswan Sunday, when she meets with the Arab Quartet. She will say that Mubarak is a vital ally, that Israel wants peace and nothing else, and that "the arc of time" will reveal the genius of a America’s plan, planting seeds of "political reform" across the region.

Many updates in the coming days. Busy at the Daily Star, which has upped coverage in the past few days. Here’s a piece on the official American reaction here in Cairo that I did, and a piece today on the despair of two leading activists/bloggers written by a friend.

 

With Palestinian frustrations rising — and demographers predicting an eventual Palestinian majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan — just saying no is not a viable option for Israel. The responsibility of the United States, as Israel’s most vital ally, is to keep that uncomfortable reality firmly in Israel’s sight.

The Times warns demographics will rear their head sometime in the future, thus bringing a shift to historical population levels. It doesn’t mention that the local, Arab population in Palestine always vastly outnumbered the Yishuv — until 1948, mass explusion, and the advent of exclusion laws. 1967 helped too. But colonization is a stinging word, and rather than look back on that, the editorial board wants to warn Americans of this surprising, novel, and "uncomfortable" reality ahead.
Maybe Times readers just don’t care for history, or the Times doesn’t want them to.

Photo: Galilee, October 1948, Palestinians fleeing to Lebanon.

Editorial judgment: the New York Times printed today a picture of a pro-Saddam demonstration in Beirut on its front page. Lebanese newspapers noted that the demonstration was quite small, and the New York Times even admitted that there were hundreds only spearheaded by Lebanese Saddam Ba`thist, `Abdul-Majid Ar-Rafi`i. In that sense, hundreds of demonstrators (pro-Saddam) get much more coverage than more than a million anti-Sanyurah demonstrators in Beirut. Like MEMRI, the New York Times and US media in general confine their coverage of Arab public opinion to either pro-Saddam (or pro-Bin Laden) Arabs or to pro-Bush Arabs. The majority of Arabs are in neither camps and they don’t get any coverage.

Via the Angry Arab.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, who incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tapped to head the Intelligence Committee when the Democrats take over in January, failed a quiz of basic questions about al Qaeda and Hezbollah, two of the key terrorist organizations the intelligence community has focused on since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

When asked by CQ National Security Editor Jeff Stein whether al Qaeda is one or the other of the two major branches of Islam — Sunni or Shiite — Reyes answered "they are probably both," then ventured "Predominantly — probably Shiite."

 
Democrats are lampooned as representing the moneyed-and-educated class — college town liberal or whatever David Brooks calls them. So why then does the new Speaker of the House nominate a Texan who says he’s "acutely aware of al Qaeda’s desire to harm Americans" and completely ignorant of everything else? Where’s Bill Clinton, or better yet, the old men (Jimmy Carter, James Baker, Robert Gates) who are, it seems, the only curmudgeons actually saying anything?

In our national public life these days, if you want to make any realistic recommendation on policy options, you have to be over 75, plenty of money in the bank and with nothing left to lose. Take Jimmy Carter and James Baker. Carter denounces Israel’s "imprisonment wall" and Baker slips Palestinians’ right of return into his Study Group’s road map to peace.

The subject of Israel’s nuclear capability was raised last week by Robert Gates, the incoming US defence secretary, who told a Senate confirmation hearing that Israel had atomic weapons. Gates on Tuesday said that Iran might want an atomic bomb because it is "surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us [the US] in the Persian Gulf". The remark led Israeli news bulletins with Israeli state-run radio suggesting that Gates may have breached a US "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy that dates back to the late 1960s.

 

Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is a professor at Berkeley and Bard. He spoke in Cairo last week as a visiting professor at AUC, days before returning to Iraq to cover the civil war. Hear his lecture here.

Danner’s essay in the current New York Review of Books frames the course in Iraq in the 2002 warning of a then-98 year-old George F. Kennan: "Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

To what end will the exposure of the incompetence and criminality of bureaucratic decisions of the last 4 years lead? The American perception to the war was blinded; it’s more recently that the lethal blunders of the White House and Pentagon are being laid bare, in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and in reviews/essays like Danner’s and the Economist’s Max Rodenbeck, also in NY Books. Condoleeza Rice didn’t know the chain of command in Iraq and Paul Bremer was stubborn in following orders to De-Baathify Iraq and immediately disband the army — even if the State Dept. knew nothing about the orders and found out about them after the fact, in the newspapers. As Danner writes,

Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider.

The real shocks of the conflict — beyond that the decision makers in the Pentagon and White House were foreign policy amateurs to horrific degrees — are the human costs in Iraq and the dominance of what Danner calls a "War of Imagination" in America since 9/11. Leaders imagined transformation through a dilettante strategy for a new Iraq and a new Middle East; the region would mold itself to evangelical idealism and neocon pet projects, like Ahmad Chalabi, no matter how far apart that view was from all reality in Iraq and beyond. The American public, responding to buzz words and reminders of terror broadcast out of Washington to a cowed, obsessed media, widely believed the image. The bodies of American soldiers and arguments over how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died jolted the dream.

…for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run"—began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.

While Danner, like many others, sees in the midterm elections a public coming-to-grips with reality and a call to dramatically alter the American course in Iraq, I’m still skeptical. This is from the detachment of living in Cairo, but whether it’s the continued controversy of the term "civil war" in American war talk or the insistence, even today, on the benefit of free elections in a country that thousands flee daily, can you say the American public is really outraged?

Will they ever be, or is this Bush’s ultimate Mission Accomplished?

Art work: George Grosz. (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany.). Die Gesundbeter (German Doctors Fighting the Blockade) from Got mit uns (God for us). (1918, published 1920). Via MoMA.

 

So the Democrats swept Congress, although the feeling and excitement of the moment was muted by being far away in Cairo.

I volunteered briefly for the DNC in Boston in 2004, working at post-convention parties and attending one night of the convention (by chance the night of Barack Obama’s keynote address). His speech aside, I was disillusioned by the big money, big party pomp of a political convention; my job as a "Finance Volunteer" was to direct people to the bar at the Science Museum party and stand around looking formal, accepting compliments from drunk delegates trying to get into the roped-off VIP area to see Wesley Clark.

There is some lingering disappointment in this Democratic sweep, since I know a shift in parties does not mean a shift in American policy in the Middle East. This is not directed at Iraq; our interests will leave us in Iraq for a few years no matter who is in power. Oil and stability are too precious.

This is directed at the elephant that is the Palestine-Israel conflict and the connected conflicts between Israel and neighboring Arab states. American politics is stuck in a dialogue about Israel’s right to defend itself, the monolith of "militants" and "extremists," and an apparent need to either look tough on security, appeal a vague idea of "the Jewish vote," or listen to AIPAC (probably all three). Today’s rejection of the UN Security Council condemnation of the Beit Hanoun killings is John Bolton’s work, to be sure, but it’s hard to think that a Democratic-appointed UN representative would act any differently.

The big faces and talking heads of the party have clear positions when it comes to Israel. Last summer, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Dick Durbin condemned Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki’s statement about Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, threatening to boycott his then-upcoming speech to Congress. In the House, Rahm Emmanuel and Nancy Pelosi echoed their calls.

What, after all, had the Iraqi PM said?

That the international community should "take a quick and firm stance to stop this aggression against Lebanon, to stop the killing of innocent people and to stop the destruction of infrastructure. What is happening is an operation of mass destruction and mass punishment and an operation using great force that Israel has — and Lebanon does not."

Not off the mark, if you look at the rubble, but deniable if you’re a Democrat or a Republican in Congress.

Late last summer, NY Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, who once wanted to be mayor of New York City, tried to bar a Palestinian delegation at the UN. They "should start packing their little Palestinian terrorist bags," the Congressman said of the delegation. Weiner later wrote a letter to Columbia urging the firing of Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab politics for his "displays of anti-Semitism."

Here is one of the briefings on AIPAC’s website after the election:

AIPAC Builds Ties With New Lawmakers
AIPAC reached nearly every lawmaker elected in Tuesday’s mid-term congressional elections as part of its effort to educate political candidates on the value of the U.S.-Israel relationship. During the campaign that ended Tuesday, nearly every viable candidate met with AIPAC professional staff members and submitted a position paper summarizing his or her views on U.S. Middle East policy. A non-partisan organization, AIPAC has for decades worked with Republican and Democratic members of Congress to strengthen the ties between the United States and Israel.

Nancy Pelosi is a definite improvement over Dennis Hastert. But here’s Pelosi at an AIPAC delegation in May 2005, via Counterpunch:

"There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist."

Apparently Pelosi has never asked a Palestinian what they think of Israel’s brutality. Not that she hasn’t witnessed the occupation first hand; Pelosi is just not concerned in the least with the Palestinian resistance.

"This spring, I was in Israel as part of a congressional trip that also took us to Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq," said Pelosi. "One of the most powerful experiences was taking a helicopter toward Gaza, over the path of the security fence. We set down in a field that belonged to a local kibbutz. It was a cool but sunny day, and the field was starting to bloom with mustard. Mustard is a crop that grows in California, and it felt at that moment as if I were home. And then we were told that the reason we had to land in that field, as opposed to our actual destination, was because there had been an infiltration that morning, and they weren’t sure how secure the area was. And that point alone brought us back to the daily reality of Israel: even moments of peace and beauty are haunted by the specter of violence."

Yes. And perhaps if Pelosi had gone over that security fence and into Gaza, she would have seen that violence is not a specter in the Occupied Terrorties, like it is in the mustard fields of Israel that remind Pelosi of California.

 

Via Harper’s.

2008 will be the 50th anniversary of iraq’s revolution, which ended the british hashemite monarchy. if we are to believe david brooks and how he frames iraq’s violent past, then maybe this will be a big moment. undoubtedly it will be commemorated, though how who knows. of course mr. brooks history of iraq, provided in an op-ed 11/00, was a polemic, a quick look at an essay based on british documents and the following summary:
 
"And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution."

while dismissing a base, unspecified view of iraq as historically violent, the reasons for bringing up history are still there. americans were the first foreign invaders and occupiers of iraq since the british; perhaps george h w bush didn’t order tanks all the way to baghdad because he didn’t want that weight on the us. perhaps george bush sr had a head for history. i could be wrong, but even if that thought crossed his mind only for a moment, that’s more than we can expect from his son. the baseless rhetoric and public talk that america rode into iraq and that continues to propel the war expects little from americans.

americans need not know a history of the modern middle east, shaped by imperialism, zionism, and increasingly since the end of the second world war, american foreign policy. the settlement program begun by israel after the june war in 1967, and supported continuously by every American president since, is only part of the picture on the ground. in the 1980s, america supported Israel’s invasion of lebanon; through the 1990s and into 2000, a perhaps hopeful peace process failed in israel/palestine, not simply because arafat rejected barak’s "generous offer" but because of the flaws of that ungenerous offer. newspapers might have described it generous, but a look at the definitive maps — which no papers provided at the time — revealed the american support for israel confining palestinians to three cantons in the west bank, dissected by israeli roads and settlement blocs. palestine would have been the gaza strip and a broken west bank, behind a expanding, meandering wall, the ‘67 borders constantly being redrawn by settlements.

immediate military aid for israel throughout the second intifida, when the ratio of palestinian and israeli death was near 10 to 1, and the bush administration’s support of increased israeli aggression and settlement expansion under sharon did not disappear as factors on the ground when america began its war on terror. they did not go away when america invaded iraq. when we ask why so much of the middle east is not ‘moderate’ to our liking, why iraqis — thank you mr. brooks — have a historical penchant for being violent, greedy, and against the common good — well, that is when we need to ask other questions. why the american view is so essentialist, casting ‘moderate’ against ‘rogue’ and ‘terror’ against ’security’ in such a way that precludes any real consideration of the place and the increasingly american presence in the region, whether directly in iraq or indirectly along the separation wall, in the grid of new west bank settlements, or in the empty space of a bulldozed palestinian home.

if in 2008 violence in iraq has subsided and the american-catered government can pacify the country, then perhaps the celebration of 1958 will take on a glow of actual progress. if in 2008 we are where we are today, which is fairly close, just worse, than where we were in 2005 and 2004, then 1958 will likely be remembered another way.

if the dates and details actually impress themselves on us, perhaps the totality of american history in the middle east, from the 1950s to the present, will tell us to finally scale back our involvement, to change course, to not push all the way to baghdad, and to try and actually broker even resolution in israel and palestine. maybe when we see the iraqi revolution of 1958 in 2008, we will takes the significance of the moment, which was the collapse of the british system there, and apply it preemptively on the course of american foreign policy.

On a day when the British government announced that it will spy on Muslim students, since universities have become "fertile recruiting grounds," Martin Newland comments on the current acceptance of undermining all symbols of religion with a skeptical, if not scathing  and supposedly informed eye:

Reactions in everyday secular society to manifestations of religiosity, such as the veil, range from a patronising accept-ance to the downright insulting. We are told, by the diligent self-publicist Salman Rushdie, that the veil "sucks". Columnist Allison Pearson says the veil is a "nosebag" and a "female-inhibiting shroud from the House of Taliban". Yasmin Alibhai-Brown claims that the veil is not mandated by the Qur’an. But what is mandated is that women cover themselves. What is also mandated is that men dress plainly. And the original texts have been followed, as in all the mainstream faiths, by teachings and interpretation which are also considered by the faithful to be linked to the will of God.

I’m sorry Mr. Rushdie but I don’t think I could comfortably vilify a majority of the female population of Cairo and many of the students at AUC. Nor do I think, Ms. Pearson, that any of them believe they are falling in line with the Taliban by being devout.

Via Amitava Kumar. Read more about the jihad ad campaign (this one is a leaked newspaper ad) which has since been pulled from the radio in Ohio.