Cruelty and silence in perspective
(A comment on Kanan Makiya’s book: Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World. Norton, 1993, 367 pp.)
In his new book, Kanan Makiya tells the story of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and the March 1991 uprisings against the Baathi regime by means of a collection of poignant personal narratives. Despite his gullibility, dilettantism and exaggerations as a reporter and interviewer (already discussed in Eqbal Ahmad’s review[1]), readers would nevertheless note that, while revealing the violence and cruelty of the Iraqi regime, Makiya did not forget those of its victims, the Kurdish and Southern rebels. They would also be interested in his critique of the Shiite Islamist option for Iraq, his warning against sectarianism and his call upon the Iraqi opposition to work for a united Iraqi identity rather than indulge in a competition between victims to prove who suffered more. Many would equally appreciate the pages he wrote on the persistent breaches of human rights in other Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc.), an exercise not very common in the literature of the Iraqi opposition.
However, it soon becomes apparent that Makiya’s reporting is a leitmotif for a series of reflections and polemics along two themes: the ‘cruelty’ inherent in Arab culture and the ‘silence’ of Arab intellectuals on the horrors of the Iraqi dictatorship. Thus, a ‘morally bankrupt’ Arab intelligentsia- at best passive toward this culture of ‘cruelty’- is also held responsible for the existence and persistence of the Iraqi regime: “Leaders like Saddam Hussein- he writes- thrive on the silence of the Arab intelligentsia toward cruelty. They are also created by that silence ” (p. 325). This last sentence is not just a figure of speech; it characterizes a whole outlook, whereby ‘cultural’ factors, transformed by Makiya into stereotypes, are seen as lying at the roots of material realities and the conduct of men.
One would have thought that the author could at least be consistent in this role attributed to the cultural moment. In fact, the very ‘culturalist’ Makiya reveals a highly politicized and paranoid interpretation of things cultural. On a visit to the Iraqi capital, the poet Mahmoud Darwish, reminded of a verse by a classical Arab poet to whom Baghdad appears as a moon, spoke of the ‘Moon of Baghdad’ and used this phrase as a title for an article for the Paris-based weekly Al-Yawm al-Sabi`. Kanan Makiya insists that this is an attribute of, or rather a tribute to, Saddam Hussein, and accuses Darwish of “heaping praise and thanks upon the ‘moon of Baghdad’ [Saddam Hussein?]” (Pp. 310-311). The question mark hardly hides the fraudulent manipulation.
Allegedly, Makiya is fighting against a widely spread habit in the Arab World of blaming all ills on the West. His reply is to mechanically put all the blame on Arab nationalism and deep-rooted Arab ‘cultural’ traditions. Thus any criticism of the positions and policies of Western powers is met with the blackmail of adopting a ‘conspiratory’ view. The result of such an endeavor is a messy amalgam which combines naïveté and bad faith, manipulation of quotes and evidence and defamation, all instilled in a manichean and stereotyped view of both Arab and Western cultures and of Arab-Western relations. Makiya’s ‘critical’ method consists in proving himself right by proving everybody else wrong. His demonisation of Arab nationalism becomes a nihilist rejection of everything Arab.
***
‘Arab intellectuals’ is a generic term which covers a variety of diverse and contradictory categories of people of different social statuses, outlooks on life and locations vis-a-vis the existing regimes. Many of our rulers now are intellectuals, especially in those regimes ruled by self-appointed ‘vanguard’ parties responsible for educating a people infested with the trinity of ills “poverty, ignorance, and sickness” (Michel `Aflaq). Many other Arab intellectuals perform the role of legitimizing the existing regimes. Perhaps the widest category of Arab intellectuals is now positioned in an intermediary and ambivalent technocratic location between State and society. Yet the intellectuals who attract Makiya’s wrath and fires belong to that category of dissident and critical intellectuals, who, in their intellectual production, literary works, and public positions have sought to maintain a certain measure of independence vis-a-vis the regimes in place. In fact, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, Muhammad `Abid al-Jabiri, Sadiq al-`Azm, Abd al-Rahman Munif, etc. have in common exactly the opposite characteristics which Makiya attributes to them: i) they are verbose as radical critics of different aspects of Arab reality and society, dominant culture and politics, sometimes to the point of self-flagellation; ii) none of them professes Arab nationalism or can be taken to be an Arab nationalist, intellectually or politically. Needless to say that Makiya does not take the pain of discussing any of their major works and judges them on their positions during the Gulf war. In fact, this category of intellectuals is a double itch for Makiya: they are critical of Arab realities and of Western imperialist policies; they opposed the American-led war of 1991 while remaining critics of the Iraqi regime.
Following is an example of the building up of cultural stereotypes and how things come to stand on their head in futile self-defeating argumentation. Makiya poses the question why so many Arabs expressed little sympathy for the plight of occupied Kuwait (pp.42-7). In fact, many ordinary Arab citizens volunteered to answer this question when interviewed by the different media during the Gulf crisis, which Makiya does not overlook. They vented feelings of injustice toward an extravagantly rich minority squandering its wealth when millions of Arabs are starving and when there is so much to do for the development of the entire Arab world and expressed a sense of bitterness toward oil-sheiks who were losing millions in gambling casinos in European capitals while Iraqi soldiers were dying for them on the front not to speak of the Palestinians of the intifada. But the ex-Trotskyist has long forgone such petty material considerations in favor of sublimated intellectualization. All such real manifestations of conflicts of interests, whether one supports them or not, are reduced to a ‘prejudice’ whose roots go back to the Arab cultural tradition of hijâ’ (satire/lampoon). Makiya takes us on a (mis) guided tour in Arab poetics from the great al-Mutanabbi in the tenth century, reduced to a vindictive poem against Kafour, the ex-slave ruler of Egypt, to the contemporary Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, in a poem against the oil-rich. But once we know that the cultural tradition of hija’, to which he attributes the Arabs’ hostility toward the Kuwaitis, exists in all cultures, what remains of Makiya’s cultural gymnastics?
In fact, all occasions are good for sniping. Edward Said, criticizing the bias involved in the fact that many good Arab literary works are still left untranslated in the West, finds himself accused of blaming the West for the “mess created by Saddam Hussein”. In addition, Arab publishers are summoned to testify to the miserable state of the Arab book and the decline of the cultural level of the Arab reader. One publisher speaks of the “proportionately low number of readers among Arabs by comparison with the West”- as if somebody has pretended otherwise or that the comparison initially holds! While a Lebanese bookshop-owner in Paris goes even deeper in his investigation and ends up with a brilliant Freudian discovery that the “problem goes back to childhood”. All this in order to refute Said’s pretension of a flourishing Arab cultural scene (p.280-281). I confess to my total failure in seeing any relationship between the availability and non-availability of appreciable Arab literary works worth translation and the miserable condition of the Arab book, including such aberrations as censorship and the assassination of writers![2] The fact is that Makiya’s ultra-sophisticated intellectual system cannot conceive of a situation- which has recurred many a time in history to have become the rule rather than the exception- in which art and literature play the role of last refuge of resistance and last source of hope in general crises or even cultural slumps!
Other arguments are simply semi-racist prejudice. We are thus informed that a “majority of Arabs” believe in imaginary birds which have defeated the Ethiopians in pre-Islam and are likewise capable of defeating Mr. Bush’s army; and Arab intellectuals have, of course, done very little to counter this myth (p. 160). What proof does Makiya have in support of this sweeping statement concerning the beliefs of tens of millions of people? None except the fact that these imaginary birds are mentioned in the Qoran. By the same logic, it could be construed that a “majority of Westerners” believe that man can walk on water!
In such a situation, how could one conceive of the existence of secular of Arab intellectuals? Here is a proof: “Fawwaz Trabulsi, a Lebanese secular leftist, wrote of the Arab masses “who have not forgotten that their main enemy is the United States,” with its “aggressive culture” and “colossal contempt shown to their religious and cultural identity-Islam”. (Cruelty and Silence, p. 279.) Makiya has cut the following phrase in italics: “…their main enemy is the United States, whose interests they confront daily, whether in the form of the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, of Israel, of an aggressive culture…”(Middle East Report, p. 32). Of course, he has no time to waste on such trivialities as economic relations, oil, terms of trade, development, distribution of wealth, social justice and the like. According to him, the West is a benevolent, altruistic non-interested entity, which progressively thins out to become pure Culture. But, I would have thought that being secular is one thing, respecting people’s religious beliefs and culture is another. To the best of my knowledge, secularism pertains to the realm of dissociating the State and its institutions from religion and religious institutions. But, the same uncompromisingly secular Makiya, who condemns secular Arab intellectuals for failing in their secularism, condemns them also for not having unconditionally supported the Iraqi intifadas of March 1991 when he himself criticizes the Southern Iraqi rebels for having raised the slogan of Shiite ja`fari sectarian rule over the whole of Iraq (p. 94)!
In fact, Makiya’s logic is the other side of the coin of that of the Islamists: both seek to prove the uniqueness of Arab-Islamic culture; the latter to assert its hermetic exclusivity, the former, to prove its debilitating inferiority. ‘Cruelty’ is such a particularly unique Arab case. Makiya is simply horrified at the fact that invading Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait ate, slept and defecated in the same rooms they occupied (p. 32).[3] Would he believe that the Israeli soldiers occupying Lebanon in 1982 have defecated in monasteries, churches, cultural centers (the French CERMOC, for one) and the Beirut international airport? This Israeli ‘cultural’ habit decidedly does not justify the conduct of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, nor does it, for that matter, explain the Arab-Israeli conflict! Arab machism is also made to be unique among machisms as Makiya cannot express his objection to the humiliating condition of Arab women without producing a phantasmagoric professional and official rapist, belonging to the Iraqi intelligence, and making Iraqi, and even Arab, males his accomplices because of their attachment to the honor code (p. 291). Finally, this course in comparative cultures serves us a thorough reflection about the different Arab and Western ‘cultural’ attitudes toward farting and belching in public.
One would have imagined that this call on Arabs to look inwardly into their ills and stop blaming others, amounts to a call for cultural Arab self-regeneration and self-liberation. Not in the least. The Iraqis, for ones, are to be liberated and democratized by none other than General Schartzkopf’s troops!
That Makiya has opted for another culture to the point of identifying with it, is, of course, his business. That he perceives all that is problematic in Western culture and civilization as a set of absolute truths, is a symptomatic malady of the cultural parvenu. But to assume an undeserved position of superiority which he can only express by judging Arab and Islamic culture with such vulgar stereotypes, that is what we are objecting to. In his infatuation with the West and his reduction of everything to the cultural level, Makiya reacts in a pavlovian way to any Arab criticism of Western states’ policies or attitudes, by snapping at you: Western culture is better than Arab culture. Yes, Mr. Makiya, present Western culture (that is, after the horrors of two world wars and the Shoah!!) is infinitely more tolerant and pluralistic than Arab culture and infinitely more advanced. That happens to be the main reason why so many (naïve) Arab intellectuals have appealed and still appeal to the West to be faithful to its tradition in dealing with the Arab World. To be as universal in its values as it pretends.
For it so happens that democracy at home has easily accommodated colonialism, wars, spoilage, theocracies, repressive regimes and dictatorships abroad. Not to say that it strives on them. And that has been particularly true in the case of the Arab World. Many readers would be grateful if Makiya can give them just one example, in the modern history of the Middle East, when a Western power intervened to defend or impose a democratically elected government. All that is known is their role in encouraging military coup-d’Etats, propping up dictators and defending oligarchs. It is up to Makiya to prove that Western powers, with their multinational corporations, oilmen and arms manufacturers and dealers, have more interest in setting up in our region complicated electoral mechanisms and democratic institutions- with their intricate maze of parliamentary commissions and sub-commissions, transparency rules and financial hearings and controls, etc.- rather than maintain and rely upon the more convenient absolute monarchs, sheiks and autocrats who can deliver contracts worth tens of billions of dollars in a few minutes! Until further evidence to the contrary, what holds true is the formula proposed by Noam Chomsky – another ‘friend of the Arab intellectuals’ subjected to Makiya’s ‘cruelty and silence’ bashing- namely that when profits are at stake, human rights and democracy don’t even appear on the agenda.
Makiya is revolted and horrified by underdeveloped cruelty and violence in our countries. Justly so. So are we all. But is that enough reason for being so insensitive, not to say admirative, toward cruelty and violence once they’re administered as clean electronic mass murder, like the one administered to his country and his own people three years ago? Cannot one admire Western civilization and seek to emulate all that is positive in it without adopting Makiya’s infantile identification which, rather than learn the hard lessons about the conditions of modernity and of democracy and the complicated processes of transition to them, only leads to hating one’s own self, people and culture?
That is and remains the question.
***
Certainly there are among Arab intellectuals many who served Saddam’s regime for long years, propagandized it and were on its payrolls. Others, previously critical, switched positions and supported Saddam during the war. They answer for their own positions. The irony is that those are not the ones Makiya’s fires are directed against. He rarely mentions any of them. Not one word is said about Kuwaiti, and other Gulf, intellectuals who raised Saddam to the skies when he was waging his/their war to contain Khomeini’s Iran. Not one word about hundreds of intellectuals from different Arab countries, not excluding many Egyptians, who for long years sang loudly the praise of Saddam and flocked in plane-loads to his ‘cultural’ and ‘literary’ festivities; the majority of whom switched sides during the Gulf crisis to join the victorious Allies.
More importantly, Makiya is not only silent but mute on those Iraqi intellectuals, Arab and Kurd, who actively collaborated with the Baathi regime and contributed to legitimize its domination. All Iraqis are simply innocented by Makiya as being both victims and at the same time accomplices of Saddam’s regime. Kanan Makiya himself has been such an accomplice to, and has collaborated with the regime in the eighties, as the chief administrator of Makiya Associates in London. He admits to no wrong and has not one word of remorse: “somebody had to do it, and it might as well have been done well”, says he in the New Yorker (January 6, 1992). Amazing indeed how some intellectuals can rationalize their actions by inventing a whole world outlook, rather than admit once to some material necessity, erroneous position, bad choice or even miscalculation! Is this what Makiya means when he talks about ‘personal style’? Whatever the case, Makiya’s ‘silence’ is deafening concerning a whole generation of Iraqis, intellectuals and other ‘ordinary’ citizens, who refused to be passive victims or accomplices of the regime and chose to rebel and resist, laying their lives for that choice or still paying for it in jail and or in exile.
According to what criterion are the non-Iraqi Arab intellectuals to be judged and so severely condemned for their positions on the Iraqi regime when the directly concerned, the Iraqi intellectuals, are beyond reproach? Take one example. The novelist Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of Cities of Salt and a Saudi exile stripped of his nationality, chose to leave Iraq in 1979 as a sign of protest against the regime’s persecution of democrats and communists, leaving behind a comfortable job as the editor of a highly-praised review, Oil and Development, to a new exile in Paris and then Damascus. That occurred around the same time that the architect Kanan Makiya had started working for the Iraqi regime. Who should judge whom? The Saudi intellectual who chose to leave Iraq rather than cover up on terror and persecution? or the Iraqi intellectual living abroad who chose then to collaborate with Saddam’s regime?
I do not pretend to speak in the name of this fringe of radical and critical Arab intellectuals who are attacked by Makiya, but am accused by him of meeting with them “under the same umbrella in defense of the “rights” of a tyrant that not one of them would ever dream of living under” (pp. 324-325). Therefore, the best I can do is answer Makiya’s accusations not only as the exercise of a legitimate right to self-defense, but also as an illustration of the distortions, blatant lies and defamation which he is capable of.
I write as someone who has spent the last three decades as a radical Arab oppositionist, a position I still vindicate. It so happened that in my itinerary, I was much implicated in Iraqi affairs. I was expelled from the Ba`th party in 1964 for having opposed the persecution of Communists and the war against the Kurds by the first short-lived Baathi regime in Iraq. In my capacity as editor to the Beirut-based weekly al-Hurriyah, from 1970 to 1982, I have been instrumental in giving a voice to the Iraqi opposition, Arab and Kurd, and in revealing torture under the Iraqi Baath as early as 1971-72. During the civil war in Lebanon, I made many trips to Iraq in my capacity as a leader in the Left alliance, the Lebanese National Movement. This did not keep me from independent positions vis-a-vis Iraqi politics. In signed articles, I opposed and condemned the Iraqi-Iranian war, from the outset, predicting catastrophic results for both peoples and both countries. Nevertheless, these visits, which I do not rate as particularly honorable in my political life, have taught me the extreme absurdity of trying to fight a dictator by collaborating with another and have thus contributed to my decision to abandon direct partisan and political activity ten years ago.
In addition, for all my politically active life, I have stood by the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination, and was one of two Arabs who attended the Conference of solidarity with the Kurdish people in Paris in 1989 (the other was the late Salim Fakhry of Iraq). Kanan Makiya admits in his book to having discovered al-Anfal, the compulsory massive expulsion of the Kurdish population, the destruction of hundreds of villages, etc.- in September 1991 (p. 201). It so happens that as early as the summer of 1989, that is more than two years before Mr. Makiya’s ‘discovery’, Zawaya, a review I edited in Paris with a group of friends, revealed aspects of the Anfal and wrote extensively on it![4]
I have done all that precisely because, while very much attached to my country of birth Lebanon, I feel very much as an Arab national and believe that Arab unity is the appropriate context for Arabs to achieve their liberation, democracy and development, to make history and occupy their place in the world, a belief as strong as my consistent criticism of the illusions and delusions of Arab nationalism in ideology and practice.
This is what Makiya has to say about my defense of the “tyrant”:
“The Lebanese leftist intellectual Fawwaz Trabulsi, long after the war and the uprising had ended and the full scope of the debacle became clear, proudly announced that he had stood by the Iraqi regime without, however, renouncing his opposition to the “repressive relations” that it maintained with its people.” (p. 244)
The first problem with Makiya is that he does not read. The article in question was published in Middle East Reports (July-August 1991) with an editorial footnote stating that it constituted an abridged version of my intervention in a round table in Paris on the14th of March 1991 published in the Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes (Spring 1991, pp. 5-35). This means that the article was not written “long after the war and the uprising had ended and the full scope of the debacle became clear”, but just on the aftermath of the debacle and while the uprising was still on. Not that this really matters, but it illustrates the lightness with which Makiya deals with others’ ideas. Yes, I did defend Iraqi rights in the conflict with Kuwait over the question of borders, the access to the Gulf, the Rumaylah oil-fields, the war-debts, etc. while at the same time calling for a peaceful settlement of this conflict. I also defended the rights of Iraq to retain its military power until a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict is reached, one which will achieve a demilitarized and nuclear-free Middle East, Israel included. This is a position difficult to understand by a manichean and simplistic mind such as Makiya’s who has called for the unilateral demilitarization of his own country.
Furthermore, rereading the above-mentioned article, I fail to detect any “pride” in my declaration. Instead, I have assumed in it the position of an Arab citizen in whose name Saddam’s war has been waged and who considers that “It is time now for an accounting”. This is what I wrote in the same article, a few paragraphs away from the one Makiya quotes:
“As an Arab citizen, I demand that he who drew me into that battle resign, for having led us into a war that could have been avoided and for having led his own people through two devastating wars. The entire Iraqi government, not only the President but the Revolutionary Command Council and the party, should be removed in order to spare Iraq any further bloodshed. We should reject the blackmail that claims that the only alternative to Saddam is anarchy… The essential thing is that the Iraqi people be free to decide the kind of regime that they want.” (ibid., p.32, my italics).
Does this call for the removal of the Iraqi regime, written when the intifadas of Iraq were still on, sound like ‘silence’? Later, in an article in Le Monde Diplomatique (September 1992, pp. 1 and 22), I called for internationally-supervised free elections to be held in Iraq. Mr. Makiya, on his part, preferred that the Saddam Hussein regime be removed by an invading army (which, in the best of cases, was looking for a Baathi military to replace him) rather than by the expression of the will of the Iraqi people!
Not only was I supposed to have defended the rights of a dictator, but to have also treated him as a ‘victim’:
“The stakes get raised when someone like Fawwaz Trabulsi coins the idea that “even as a victim”, Saddam “agreed to play the role of criminal.” What does Trabulsi mean here? In a 1991 article, he goes on: “Iraq had just emerged from its war against Iran with the kind of military potential that could alter the regional balance of forces with regards the two pillars of imperial domination: Israel and the oil regimes of the Gulf. It became imperative to…destroy its military and economic capability.[5] The Iraqi leader reacted by invading Kuwait.” In other words, Saddam chose to commit political suicide, thus satisfying the deepest desires of the U.S. imperialism. Here denial of the Arab capacity for independent action is carried to absurdity”. (pp. 257-8)
This is another blatant lie. The absurdity is only in Makiya’s blindness even to what he himself writes and his incapacity to carry through even one coherent and convincing argument. Exactly seven lines below that paragraph in Makiya’s own text, I find myself credited for being “more reasonable than some”, since “at least he [Trabulsi] imparted a moment of real choice and independent initiative to Saddam, however reactive, and at least he considers the invasion of Kuwait to have been a mistake.” I fail to see how I could have “carried the denial of the Arab capacity for independent action to absurdity ”- because I said that one Arab individual, namely Saddam Hussein, reacted to the attempts to destroy Iraq’s military potential by invading Kuwait- and be at the same time credited- for no apparent reason in Makiya’s text and for no further evidence he provides- with having imparted “a moment of real choice and independent initiative to Saddam, however reactive…”! Incidentally, I did not consider the occupation of Kuwait to have been a “mistake”, but denounced it outright and from the very start (see Le Monde, August 21, 1990).
This is the remaining part of the paragraph I wrote, which Makiya intentionally omits:
“The Iraqi leader reacted by invading Kuwait, a gesture which, according to a minimalist reading, was akin to taking hostages prior to negotiations but which, in its maximalist reading, gave Saddam the illusion of being able to annex the emirate permanently. This, in any case, was the beginning of a tragic succession of errors whereby the Iraqi president, weak as he was, believed that he was playing the strong man, imagining that he could defy a military apparatus ready for “star wars” with an army constructed along the lines of World War I.This provided the drama: Saddam Hussein was outfitted in the costume of Hitler, and he was delighted to wear it.” (pp. 30-31, my italics)
Could there be any doubt that Saddam’s weakness referred to here is not vis-a-vis his own people nor vis-a-vis the people of Kuwait, but a military weakness vis-a-vis the US and its allies?
This is my own reading of what led to the war: it took two parties to make a war: Bush was seeking it, Saddam gave it to him. This version fits with the results. Does Makiya’s version fit, he who attaches no weight for such factors as oil, refuses to admit any US role in blocking an Arab solution through the Arab league and denies any US intention of cutting Iraq down to size before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait? His version amounts to the following: “until the last minute, the United States built Saddam Hussein up because it wanted him as a strategic ally in the region to counter Iran”. They decide to cut him to size after he took everyone by surprise by entering Kuwait (pp. 257-8).
Fair enough. What does the admission by Makiya that the US had “built” Saddam mean? Doesn’t it mean that when geo-political and strategic interests are at stake, nobody cared about Saddam’s persecution of his people and for human rights and democracy in Iraq? Doesn’t it also mean that an army built, among others, with the help of the West’s funds, technology and help (remember Iran-gate?) is a formidable force against a people’s opposition however strong this opposition might be; the proof so tragically revealed in the crushing of the intifadas of March 1991?
Despite all this, Makiya blames the Allies not for having waged the war against his own country, but for having failed to finish it by occupying Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam. He maintains that the greatest harm done to Iraq was not the result of the war itself but the consequence of the fact that it was left “unfinished”. Now that a crippled Iraq is still under embargo and dismembered by a de facto partition into three zones by the northern and southern ‘safe havens’, now that the US militarily occupy the Gulf- to the detriment of the Damascus accord on building an Arab security force in that region- that Israel’s monopoly of nuclear and chemical arms is guaranteed, and the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations are carried under this grave imbalance of power between the two parties, now that the price of the war has been paid in cash by a weakened and indebted Saudi Arabia … Saddam still holds power in Iraq! What, then, should this tell us about the nature of the war, its motives, conduct and goals? Doesn’t that require some accounting from those who prophesied that it was a war for democracy in Iraq, not to speak of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the rest? Shouldn’t the likes of Fred Halliday- who had it that if the choice was between imperialism and fascism, he would choose fascism- advise us on what to do when imperialism does not rid you of fascism and we’re left with both over your head?
One last word about solidarity. Being critical of one’s own government and, for that matter, of Arab society and politics in general, does it impose silence on the behavior of the Arab opposition parties, and in this case the Iraqi opposition? Does it imply that one should approve an opposition, which is still, in the majority of its 72 parties, organizations, factions and clans, in favor of the embargo imposed on its people or ‘silent’ about it? Is the ‘Arab intellectual’ supposed to give his support to the “federation” for the Kurds of Iraq and keep his mouth shut on the elementary rights of the Kurds of Turkey? More, the Iraqi Kurds have no need for the support or solidarity of Arab intellectuals if their aim is to secede from Iraq, they would need them undeed when they decide to imagine new forms of Arab-Kurdish coexistence based on mutual interests and mutual respect for each other’s rights. Are the Arab intellectuals to hail the military operations launched by Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga against the militants of the Kurdish Turkish PKK, considering the former “freedom fighters” and the latter mere “terrorists”? Being on the side of the oppressed Kurds of Iraq, should it impose silence on its leaders who have collaborated with Israel and the CIA to the detriment of their own people and the rest of the Arabs before being dropped by Mr. Kissinger when he brokered the Saddam-Shah accord of 1975? Should not those leaders be also accountable to their people and to the Arab peoples for having dreamt of entering Iraq riding on the tanks of the victorious Ayatollah Khomeini? then in the trail of those of General Schwarzkopf?
Why should one merely hail the March 1991 intifadas and keep silent on the massive armed Iranian intervention (which Makiya seeks unsuccessfully to dismiss) or on the Kurdish leadership which sent its armed militants to take over Kurdish cities when it knew perfectly well that Saddam Hussein’s defeated army can still use its tanks and helicopters and thus muster infinitely superior power? Should we follow its trail now and say that that was the fault of the ‘spontaneity’ of the masses? Should we hail and support Mr. Talbani and Barazani when they decide, after the bloody crushing of their insurrection, to negotiate with Baghdad, thus splitting the Iraqi opposition, dropping the demand for democracy for the whole of Iraq and allowing the regime the required breathing space to crush the intifadah in the South? Even Kanan Makiya finds some ground for criticism in this latter conduct!
In his earlier book, The Republic of Fear, Makiya had made the ‘fear’ and the complicity of the Iraqis the main factor responsible for the existence and persistence of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He brushed off such factors as i) the social base of the regime which benefited from the tremendous State expenditure during the oil-boom years; ii) the sizable Arab and international backing that the regime enjoyed; iii) the overwhelming military power that the regime had at its disposal against its own people, etc. The intifadas of March 1991, having proven the shameful impudence of the concepts of ‘fear’ and complicity, Makiya, by a simple transfer of guilt, wants now to convince us that the dictator is the product of Arab culture and the ‘silence’ of Arab intellectuals. The only actor who is absolved of any responsibility are the Western powers!
Of the many cultural traditions worth getting rid of in our part of the world, Makiya has followed the most abject: the tribal rule of spite according to which “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. In politics, it leads to a pathetic blindness to the complexity of factors that make a conjuncture. In culture, Makiya has demonstrated how an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the said ‘friend’, renders ‘knowledge’ of the Arab World, of Iraq in particular, further impoverished by such ‘concepts’ as ‘fear’, ‘cruelty’ and ‘silence’- so formidable and horrible in actual reality- yet so empty and shallow in his intellectualizing…
Fawwaz N. Traboulsi
- see his “The Question of Iraq” in The Nation, August- 9-16, 1993, pp. 178-181. ↑
- Had Makiya wanted to delve deeper into the matter, he would have touched an important factor in the decline of readership, namely the rapidly spreading consumption of television, video and video games, the highest rates of which are in the oil-rich Arab countries and among the new generation, a matter which poses the question of “cultural imperialism” whether he likes it or not. ↑
- According to the benevolent Makiya, this fact explains why Kuwaitis believe all Iraqis stink! ↑
- In its first issue (July-August 1989, pp. 59-60) Zawaya revealed the construction of the buffer zone on the Iran-Iraq borders, the expulsion of 200.000 Kurds, the destruction of tens of villages and the resistance of civilian Kurds to the Baathi tanks in Qal`at Darzeh and other locations. The same issue carried a testimony by an Arab from Southern Iraq whose peasant family had been forcibly moved to the North to replace Kurds displaced to the South. The second occasion (nos. 2/3, September 1989, pp. 66-69) was the publication of a reportage carried by two Iraqi journalists among the 350 Iraqi Kurdish refugees hosted by the French government in a village in the Auvergne region. In the interviews, they gave details of the whipping up of the memory of the Halabjah massacre by Baathi troops in order to frighten the inhabitants out of their villages which were immediately destroyed, they told about the children who were lost or died on the way to exile; but they also had bitter recollections of their ill-treatment at the hands of the Turkish authorities who refused to consider them as refugees and made all attempts to expel them back to Iraq, the bad food and sanitary conditions in the Turkish camps, etc. ↑
- The text actually reads: “It became imperative to contain Iraq and destroy its military and economic capability”. I cannot imagine why Makiya should cut that sentence except the deliberate will to disfigure and discredit! ↑