24 June 2004ApologiesI'm sorry about the delay in posting. Writing a series of articles based on my PhD dissertation in order rapidly to give my CV some academic substance has interfered. Here are just some miscellaneous remarks. Ultra-violenceIn the same week that I published my essay "Cinderella and Trailer Trash" on the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs, Susan Sontag published a commendable article in The Guardian's "G2" magazine on the same topic (reposted here). Especially worthy of note was her point that these photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured were not just evidence of the United States' inhumane and oppressive colonial administration -- though this is hardly unique, since it has been evident before in other modern empires -- but also of a more pervasive brutalisation of American society. This atmosphere of retribution and violence made the swapping of souvenir photos of torture socially permissible; it seems more and more of us perversely share the excitement of living through the mutual thrill and even competitive one-upmanship of ultra-violence. Sontag gives particular attention to the brutalisation of sex, so obvious in the photos, a tendency that should at least provide us with an operative distinction between pornography and erotica. In this light, right-wing American radio commentator Rush Limbaugh's remark that the degradation and abuse of inmates in Abu Ghraib was equivalent to and as harmless as a university fraternity "prank" is apposite -- perhaps more so than even this pill-popping hateful windbag intended. One might consider the report "Campus gang rape", which Bernice Sandler published in the US nearly twenty years ago, but which Rose George nonetheless cited in her recent article in "Weekend Guardian" on the increasing frequency of gang rape in Britain (with reference also to France). It is appalling that little has changed for the better in the last twenty years, a fact that only lends support to Sontag's thesis. (See other articles on Bernice Sandler's website.) Where are the trailers, and where is the trash put out?I am grateful for Jim Symonds's comments on my aforementioned essay, which reminded me that there is a distinct geographical aspect to being "trailer trash". The status is a spatially demarcated and clearly visible sign (to the condescending) of having fallen from the grace of Whiteness, though this attribute may have been an afterthought in the first instance, as historically in the condition of the Irish and the Italians in America. Wage-earning white people living in the suburbs of Baltimore are simply "(lower) middle class", whereas descendents of West Virginians and Maryland Panhandlers living in Pig Town in south-west Baltimore (adjacent to Black neighbourhoods) are "white trash". The conflict and negotiation over Whiteness or "trashness", or both, is localised in different ways: it can be effected "vertically" and sequentially within one circumscribed institution or "horizontally" by simple lateral movement between different locales with their constituent institutions. In other words, you can move up from being trash and over from being non-White -- though this isn't the end of the permutations. Please keep the comments coming to mflane@acephale.org! Coming soonI've made inquiries to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross / Red Crescent concerning the conditions of imprisonment and legal standing of Iraqi scientists arrested on charges of involvement in WMD programmes. My landlord had raised the interesting, if somewhat characteristically paranoid, question of what the US would do to stanch or channel an Iraqi "brain drain", especially from the field of developing biological pathogens. So far only AI has responded to my inquiry, stating that it sent a letter to the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, over five months ago asking the same questions and had yet to get a reply. I hope to write something on the issue in this blog soon, more substantial than the current entry. I'm also working on a punk rock diddy called "I've got a crush on Germaine Greer". Be good. Be well. MFL THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA: A HOUSE OF CARDS"Red" Ken Livingston, mayor of London, must spend much of his time laughing happily. He is virtually assured of being re-elected by a considerable majority in tomorrow's polls, just as he was voted into office in 2000. [In fact, the Conservative Steven Norris had a generally unexpected good showing, and Livingstone won with 55 percent of the vote. -- MFL] Having been expelled from the Labour Party for not toeing the "New Labour" line and then running as an independent candidate, he is one of few politicians to have got one up on Tony "Smarmy" Blair. Blair, realising that another defeat for a Labour candidate at the hands of Livingstone would be more humiliating than rescinding the sentence of exile, finally ate crow and admitted Ken Livingstone back into the party he leads in January of this year. This means that Livingstone once again has access to the Labour Party's apparatuses and wherewithal and still does not have to retract a single dissident statement he has made: he continues to decry the war in Iraq as "illegal", to show up at anti-war rallies, to call George Bush "the most dangerous man on the planet", and, more quietly now, to suggest that New Labour's transportation policy of "public-private initiatives" is a mess, while his for London goes from success to success. His triumphant re-entry into the Labour Party is a greater display of his personal political canniness than his figuratively giving Margaret Thatcher the finger, even as she abolished the "Trotskyist" Greater London Council in 1986, by blowing £250,000 of the funds she was trying to sequester on a giant street party for Londoners on the last day of the GLC's existence. Livingstone does not refrain from making further observations about foreign policy, even though he has struck something of a comprise with the Labour Party's National Executive Committee by trying keep his politics in metropolitan London, while allowing them the rest of the world. He is in the habit of calling things as he sees them, often in very stark terms, and in this regard, he offers a refreshing break from the central government's constant browbeating of platitudes and double-talk. After terrorists shot dead 22 foreign workers in an protected enclave in Al-Khobar in Saudi Arabia last weekend, Livingstone repeated his contention on BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme that "we shouldn't be at all surprised to wake up one day soon and find the Saudi royal family swinging from lampposts; and what's likely to replace them is not some nice liberal democracy but something more like ... the Taliban". Ken has a point. Anyone at all worried about the state of global politics, should be concerned by the increasing violence against Western and associated targets in the Arabian peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia, since the 1991 Gulf War, from the suicide car bombing of a US military base in Al-Khobar in 1996 to the boat attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 to the shooting death of BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers and grave wounding of reporter Frank Gardner in the Saudi capital Riyadh just this week. The United States and its allies are deluding themselves by believing that the corrupt and tyrannical hereditary regime of Saudi Arabia is a standard of "stability" in the region -- a term we are cajoled into conflating with "democracy" or at least profitable business. It is no longer so easy for the Saudi authorities to blame shooting and bombing deaths among foreigners on internecine violence, as they have done. Charges of warfare between foreign gangs involved in illicit trades have never stuck, as hard as the Saudi authorities tried [1]. Surveys by polling firms and reports from the street indicate massive sympathy for Osama bin Laden and his cause, if not exactly for his running the country. Armed cells seem to exist everywhere, capable acting with little fear of retribution, even in city centres, and iconic bin Laden start-up messages are widely available for mobile phones. The anti-Western, particularly anti-American, bent of this resistance should be no surprise, since putting the recent invasion of Iraq aside for the moment, Western governments, for the sake of petroleum and military projection during at least the last three decades, have hardly lifted a finger to put a halt to the Saudi ruling elites' human rights abuses, though they are fully aware of them. These range from effective chattel slavery to punishment by torture, amputation and death. The media in Britain were justifiably alarmed by reports of the Saudi security forces' indifference in investigating the recent shooting of the two BBC employees, mentioned above. While the Saudi government has lately been making a great show of the willingness and capability of its special forces, including the (actually rather inept) raid on the compound in Al-Khobar, there has long been evidence of dissent, not just in the rank and file of the army and police forces, but also in the upper echelons of the security and intelligence agencies. Indeed, this was a major issue raised in the US Congress's report on the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001. With disturbing implications, not does the report suggest that the FBI knew that two Saudi Arabians with close connections to Saudi intelligence agencies, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, were instrumental in channelling money to some of the 9-11 hijackers, but also the relevant sections of the report, as well as those that underscore the political connections between the Bushes and the House of Sa'ûd, are the most thoroughly censored; even parts of the table of contents are "redacted", as they like to say in Langley. Michael Moore's latest, Palm d'Or-winning film "Fahrenheit 9/11" also puts the spotlight on these political linkages, and it is this exposé, at least as much as the film's negative imagery of war, that has led to its release being delayed in the United States until the end of this month. The broader picture, then, is of the Saudi government deeply divided against itself. Many in ruling circles already had misgivings about the instalment of American soldiers in their country from 1991, and some worried that it would become a base of Christian proselytism in a nation-state founded by a religious association, or "brotherhood" (ikhwân), representing the Wahhâbî traditionalist tendency of Sunnite Islam and conserving its precepts. The Christian Right in the United States, an important part of the senior Bush's constituency, reacted with horror at the heathens' confiscation of crate-loads of Bibles destined for US soldiers. Osama bin Laden, conversely, made much of infidels invading the homeland of Islam's two most sacred places, Mecca and Medina, and influencing the Caliphate that ostensibly protects them. Nonetheless, winning over part of the Saudi royal family with flattery and lucre dates to before the first Gulf War, though we are often told these days that this date marks the beginning of our troubles. Although President Eisenhower had recognised the importance of securing good relations with the petroleum-rich kingdom as long ago as the 1950s, the importance of Saudi Arabia to the West came to the fore during the 1973 Arab oil embargo, popularly known as the "Energy Crisis", provoked by the loses suffered by Egypt in its war against US-backed Israel. However, with the fall of the friendly Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran in January of 1979, the US especially recognised the particular strategic importance of controlling the Middle East, not just by an Israeli proxy, but by a sort of "pincers movement" through the states on the western side of the Persian Gulf, including Iraq. The late President Reagan began by authorising the sale of five very expensive and sophisticated AWACS [2] aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981, stating,
In good imperial fashion, the US supported both sides in the murderous Iran-Iraq War, switching back and forth depending up which side seemed to be winning at the moment -- though by and large, it lent most of its support to Saddam. From as early as 1983, however, the US secretly negotiated arms and intelligence deals with Iranian clerics and eventually diverted the proceeds to funding terrorists in Central America who raided Nicaragua from neighbouring countries, killing nearly 20,000 people (often with weapons the Israeli army had taken in Lebanon in 1982) [4]. It was during one of the episodes of supporting Iraq, that then Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld was famously photographed shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. When Saddam used firepower and chemical weapons against Kurds and Shiite, so called "Marsh Arabs" toward the end of the war ("his own people" as we are constantly told), he tried -- fairly successfully, it seems, given the international silence at the time -- to claim that they were a threat to national security and in cahoots with the Iranians. While some of these events in the Middle East have trickled into the press's ink with stories surrounding the current war in Iraq, what has gone and is largely forgotten in television-rooms in the West is that in November of 1979, the same month that Iranian students, under the direction of the Ayatollah Khomeini, took the staff of the US Embassy in Tehran hostage, the imam Juhayman ibn Muhammad and his followers (tulub, "talibs") occupied the Great Mosque in Mecca for two weeks in protest against what they saw as political and religious corruption in the House of Sa'ûd. The Saudi army responded by killing over 100 of them on the spot, and subsequently the authorities publicly beheaded 63 alleged conspirators. Even then the Saudi kingdom had unstable foundations. None of this was lost on the so called "neo-conservatives" who designed Bush Junior's foreign policy. The Project for the New American Century published its Rebuilding America's Defenses in September of 2000, just before the last presidential election. The contributors include now Assistant Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and right-wing media pundit Billy Kristol. PNAC recommended the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime both so that the US could be rid of an asset-turned-nuisance and so that the US could extend its military might in the region (see also some early PNAC documents), though this right-wing think tank was still sanguine about maintaining a presence in Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, when Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2003, he employed bases in Kuwait and Qatar, including the state-of-the-art Al-Udeid airfield. Now that the US has planted itself in Iraq, and Saudi Arabia is looking more and more volatile, the executors of PNAC's designs must be hoping that they can keep forward bases in Iraq. This line of thinking surely informs the American insistence, evident in UN Security Council Resolution 1546 passed yesterday, that American armed forces remain autonomous even after the inauguration of a "sovereign" Iraqi government at the end of this month. That all the parties voted in favour of the resolution has more to do with not wanting to be seen to oppose Iraqi self-rule than with whether the term "sovereignty" has any practical reality. However, as is terrifyingly clear, Iraq is far from "stable", even in the American government's narrow sense of receptive or amenable to the quartering of US soldiers. The empire-builders can hardly retreat, so to speak, in their long-term strategic plans, to Saudi Arabia and while the maintenance of bases in Kuwait and Qatar is conceivable for the short duration, one must bear in mind that these are small fiefdoms with identities derived in part form colonial legacy, and that they hang on the edge of a shaky Saudi kingdom. The US administration finds itself between the horns of a dilemma. Nonetheless, not content with achieving nominal consent from the Security Council, President Bush declared the other day that he intends to pursue the cause of "democracy" throughout the Arab and Muslim word. What exactly he mean by this is not obvious, seeing how the House of Sa'ûd still enjoys our support and serial offender Libya has just been re-admitted to the Axis of Virtue. What is more, he wants NATO, not the United Nations, to take the lead, contrary to NATO's charter, regardless of the fact that the mere suggestion of this project reduces the image of the Security Council to a stunted figleaf and would be transparently the Seventh Crusade to the Muslim ummah. After the misadventure in Iraq, one might wonder if the evidently skill-less "architects" of the new Middle East mean to start with Saudi Arabia, even though the stereotype of Arabs enjoying, or at least meekly acquiescing to rule by despots has served them well until now, and consequently they have never really given a damn about democracy in the region. Not that they care now, in light of George Bush's utter contempt for democracy at home. What Bush surely must mean by "democracy" is security of US investments and sources of income abroad. The Saudi government has bristled at the prospect of a "democratization" project, probably as much because of the firestorm it would unleash among its own people, as for fear of a legitimate democratic challenge to its own hereditary offices. The American global redecorators, farther from the heat of the action, still seem to be deluding themselves to believing that the violent attacks in Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia and against Westerners elsewhere are the work of a small number of ubiquitous, elusive, virulent and extra-rational "evil-doers", while the majority of the benighted peoples of the Muslim world are simply arrested in their political development and are passively awaiting a charitable dose of Democracy(R) and a largesse of human rights. Of course, self-styled enlightened elites can no more bestow human rights than they can enforce democracy. The concept of human rights comes from shared human experience of want, oppression and exploitation, and in equitable circumstances, is a field of continuous discovery and renegotiation. (Witness the abolition of slavery, the franchise of women and the eight-hour work day, still obtaining in some parts of the world.) Where substantive discourse on human rights has long been repressed, one often gets highly militarised, deleterious and sometimes suicidal reactionary forms of social identity, like Al-Qâ'idah and the Taliban. Furthermore, the notion that human rights are a quality that must be granted has been offered as an excuse for ignoring the abuse of people in far-off lands and for condoning genocidal tendencies: the massacre of over 500,000 people in the mid-1960s under the Suharto regime was not horrible because some Western activists misled their compatriots into believing that this was out of the ordinary way of life and death in Indonesia, but because Indonesians themselves were crying out for justice; and contrary to General Westmoreland's assertions in the 1970s, Vietnamese mothers mourn for their dead children just as American mothers do. Nonetheless, denying people the value of their experiences is a central premise of Bush and Company's project for American domination; it is assumed that the people of the Middle East in particular have no history of their own, no shared and intrinsically changing traditions -- nor even a short-term social memory of colonialism and partition, of support for tyrants, of the decimating Iran-Iraq war and of so many betrayals. What the "neo-cons" are selling us is 19th-century "white man's burden" dressed up in the language of "human rights" -- not "neo-conservatism" but neo-colonialism. It is a shame, then, to see such ostensibly left-wing essayists as Chris Hitchens, who has written so poignantly and critically on international matters ranging from the Balkans to Cyprus to East Timor, cast his lot with the Bush regime since September 11. He has expressed the opinion that the establishment of a liberal government in Iraq would set an important precedent for the Middle East, perhaps even leading to the happy demise of the Saudi monarchy [5]. I would like legitimately to be able to shout "I told you so!" at Hitchens, but actually I only told a few people who lent credence to his imperial speculations in the last few years. I think it is ironic that Hitchens decries what he perceives as the cold and clinical political analyses of academics like Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said [6], since I fear that like so many overly erudite leftoids, his own boarding school and Oxford-educated detachment is beginning to show through, and he is starting to take the snobbish turn for the worse that his Torygraph-reporting brother Peter did long ago, speaking disdainfully of the "losers" on the Left. Such hardening of attitude is an essential step in siding with the interests of Empire [7]. It is also too bad that such pronouncements have come recently from a journalist who so roundly and rightly lambasted President Reagan, who passed away to the "shining city" this week. For as "the Gipper" sails off into the Pacific sunset, George Junior has gratefully taken the territory and the sceptre that the Great Prevaricator bequeathed to him. Back in the 1980s, Red Ken thought that Reagan was the most dangerous man on the planet, just as he thinks of Bush now. Whether one thinks that Livingstone is as venal as any politician or not, one might usefully wonder if he is onto something. Footnotes1. See articles in The Economist and by the BBC. This is not to say that such allegations of corruption are completely unfounded. A friend of mine, Karin, who attended boarding school in Saudi Arabia, remembers how one could go to certain speak-easys and ask for sadîqî "my friend", illegal booze; but as is so often the case, it appeared that the "rot" had started at the head. [Back] 2. AWACS: "advanced warning and control systems". [Back] 3. Remarks to the press, 5 October 1981, in Reagan's public papers: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1981/100581d.htm. [Back] 4. Of course, some people find reason to believe that the Reagan team's contact with the Iranian mullahs dates back to before the election in 1980, resulting in the sudden release of the American hostages in Tehran. Unfortunately, I cannot address the issue of the "October Surprise" here. [Back] 5. See, for example, his essay "Wake up, peaceniks" and the transcript of his debate with Tariq Ali on the "Democracy now" radio programme. [Back] 6. See "Of sin, the Left, and Islamic fascism". [Back] 7. In fairness, I should say that it seems that Hitchens is edging away from this reactionary position. [Back] Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org | ARCHIVESMarch 2006November 2005July 2005May 2005February 2005October 2004September 2004August 2004July 2004June 2004May 2004 |