TROUBLING INFORMATION

Tag: Iraq

  • “Your Names Will Be Written in Gold”

    Just before it begins, Hani Shukrallah on what is really unique about this war (Al-Ahram Weekly, March 20-26, 2003):

    With 280,000 US and British troops deployed in the Gulf — 175,000 are in Kuwait — US military commanders were promising a war “unlike anything anyone has ever seen before,” according to the US naval commander in the Gulf, Vice Admiral Timothy Keating. Speaking to reporters on board USS Abraham Lincoln, Keating waxed poetic on the forthcoming invasion. The coalition troops would go “about this particular conflict . . . in a way that is very unpredictable and unprecedented in history — remarkable speed, breathtaking speed, agility, precision and persistence” . . . .

    On board USS Abraham Lincoln, Admiral Keating addressed hundreds of his men telling them: “When it’s all done… and they rewrite history, because that is what you are going to do, your names will be written in gold on those pages.”

    Before that gilding begins history will have to be effaced, not rewritten. An illegal war waged in blatant violation of the UN Charter and of international law; a war against which 30 million people throughout the world have already demonstrated before a single shot is fired on streets from Los Angeles to Tokyo; a war to which opinion polls in virtually all the world’s nations, with the exception of the US and Israel, have produced a definitive ‘no’ — how can such a war be recorded except in infamy? And this, before the body count.

  • Knowledge Is Power

    Edward Said on how building a more subtle knowledge of the United States and its aims would benefit the Middle East. “The Other America” (Al-Ahram Weekly, March 20-26, 2003):

    [A]part from a few courses and seminars on American literature and politics scattered throughout the universities of the Arab world, there has never been anything like an academic centre for the systematic and scientific analysis of America, its people, society, and history, at all. Not even in American institutions like the American Universities of Cairo and Beirut. This lack may also be true throughout the Third World, and maybe even in some European countries. The point I am making is that to live in a world that is held in the grip of an extraordinarily unbound great power there is a vital need for knowing as much about its swirling dynamics as is humanly possible. . . . the danger of thinking about America too simply or reductively and statically is so obvious. . . .

    My interest is simply to suggest ways of understanding, intervening in, and if the word isn’t too inappropriate, resisting a country that is far from the monolith it is usually taken to be, specially in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

  • Protests: Vietnam

    Peter Davis, writing from Vietnam in The Nation (posted 3/20/03):

    In this country, where a US military attack echoes more loudly perhaps than anywhere else in the world, protesters against the war are expressing themselves from Hanoi in the north to central Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta. At Nha Trang, a resonant place name in our old war, 7,000 people demonstrated yesterday against our new one. The chief sentiment is not support for Saddam Hussein but, in light of the Vietnamese experience with the American military, sympathy for the Iraqi people.

    In Hanoi the government condemned the war as “a gross violation of the fundamental principles of international law, including the United Nations charter.” Such language is unexceptional in prosperous countries that look at the United States on an almost equal footing economically. In Vietnam, which desperately needs American trade and is urgently trying to attract US investment, the condemnation is an act of courage. Since the normalization of diplomatic relations less than ten years ago, the Vietnamese have worked hard to be friendly to an often indifferent America, and any criticism of the United States is generally muted. The war against Iraq threatens to unravel the meticulously rebuilt relationship.