14 March, 1998
Gulliver in the Middle East
By Edward Said
Gulliver's Travels published by the great Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift in l727 is a classic political satire. It is the story of an Englishman, Lemuel Gulliver, who decides to leave England, is shipwrecked, and in the first of the four voyages he recounts lands on an obscure island Lilliput, whose inhabitants are tiny little people measuring about six inches in height. The second voyage takes Gulliver to Brobdingnag, a country whose residents are enormous giants.
So whereas in Lilliput Gulliver describes his adventures as a giant among dwarfs, in Brobdingnag he is a dwarf among giants. Both episodes illustrate the related problems of being too big in one setting or context, and being too small in the other. Despite his immense size in Lilliput, Gulliver is victimized by the Lilliputians, who draw him into their petty intrigues, and finally decide either to kill or banish him; in Brobdingnag he is permanently disadvantaged, a tiny little human surrounded by immense creatures who are in danger of crushing him by their sheer size.
When he is finally allowed by the King of Brobdingnag to say something in defence of himself and the "normal" human world from which he comes, he launches into a long speech about life in England, with all its peculiarities of class and privilege, its court intrigues, its sordid politics and unprincipled national life., its wars, conspiracies, and general violence. Far from feeling admiration for the pitiful little being who has declaimed the speech, the King concludes instead that Gulliver belongs to "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
So disillusioned and harsh is Swift's view of political life, so uncompromising and unforgiving is its angle of vision, that it seems to me to be the only one capable of dealing with the recent Iraq-US crisis in all its drama, farce and incongruousness. Despite its immense military, economic and political power the United States in the Middle East has had all the success of Gulliver in Lilliput, ultimately trapped in local politics by its own illusions as to its strength and its moral authority. Size and authority are simply not the same thing.
Having for years behaved like an international gangster, flouting international law, supporting its clients in the most bloodthirsty exploits, resorting to subversion and insurgency in order to destabilise its enemies, the United States under George Bush suddenly discovered the importance of United Nations resolutions. No other power has resorted to the United Nations with such cynicism and contradictory policies as the United States, which is delinquent in its back payments to the world organization amounting to about l.3 billion dollars. No other member state has used the veto to defend internationally condemned behaviour (in this case, Israel's) as the US,which also like no other state, has openly vented its contempt for the world organization.
Then it finds that its position vis-a-vis Iraq is best (and opportunely) expressed in a handful of resolutions passed seven years ago, and proceeds to their literal implementation - something that has never happened before in the UN's history. In the meantime a regime of sanctions has decimated the Iraqi infrastructure, and in effect murdered I.5 million innocent Iraqi civilians. As recently as a few hours ago Madeline Albright, who lies more shamelessly than any of her predecessors in office and along with Secretary of Defence Bill Cohen acquitted herself disgracefully before a properly unimpressed audience of ordinary American citizens in Columbus, Ohio, proudly proclaimed her "humanity and concern," while at the same time boasting that the sanctions against Iraq were the most complete and punitive ever imposed in history.
Not to be undone, President Bill Clinton - squirming under a whole series of investigations as to his sexual and financial misadventures - has the remarkable gall to address the Arab people as if they were a collection of morons. The US, he says, has no quarrel with the people of Iraq; the quarrel is with Saddam Hussein who of course suffers very little under the sanctions regime while the people of Iraq continue to suffer and die. And all this was offered as a justification for a possible military strike.
Nor is this all. For weeks the media have been feeding the public a diet of stories about hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which may have them for all I know, but which are neither a threat to anyone nor, in fact, have been proved by any one to exist. The US reserves for itself to stand above all the norms of international behaviour and determines to strike if diplomacy does not work. So a massive armada of American warships, aircraft, land forces - supplemented by a tiny force of British supplies, rushed to the Gulf in an unseemly gesture of slavish solidarity with the US - has been gathering at a cost of at least 50 million dollars a day, billed directly to the US taxpayer.
Never mind that no clear war aim has emerged in the weeks of swaggering and threatening, nor any assurances that even Saddam's military forces, such as they are, would in fact fight against or be damaged by the strike. No assurances at all, any more than there was a possibility of mustering enough soldiers to attempt Iraq's dismemberment and occupation with the goal of toppling Saddam's dreadful regime. The net result of all this has been to reduce the American colossus to Saddam's stature, to make it plain that rather than a moral authority the US in its lawlessness and unilateral arrogance was on Saddam's level, a regional bully unable to do much more than strut and pose, like Gulliver pinioned by the tiny Lilliputians.
It is equally important to recall that the US, still strapped inside its crippling cold war mentality, has gone from one failure to another in its general Middle East policy. Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on the remaining tatters of the peace process, which it is important to remember is sponsored by the United States. Having just returned from ten days in Palestine I can testify to the fact that after fifty years of official state existence the Zionist juggernaut is still in the process of taking Palestinian land, destroying houses, displacing people on a daily basis, nearly all of it started with new vigour after September l993.
The US has also lost the support of even those Arab and Islamic states who are its supposed allies, so appallingly insensitive and hypocritical has its behaviour been in coddling Israel and at the same time demanding compliance from the Arabs. The November Doha summit was a fiasco, as was the more recent attempt to mobilize Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan into anti-Iraq military action. Above all, it is the brazen duplicity of American rhetoric, as embodied in the dreadful Mrs Albright who loses no opportunity to act like a macho thug, that reveals the threadbare principles (such as they are) of US Middle East policy.
How official spokesmen still can speak with a straight face of averting violence and condemning terrorism when the US has a long record of bloody illegal action all over the Third World achieved by no other power simply defies credulity. The US after all is the country that killed three million Vietnamese, that was behind the massacre of roughly l0% of the Guatemalan population during the l950s, that collaborated with the Suharto regime both in the invasion of East Timor and the killing of half a million Indonesians suspected of communism by Suharto, that connives daily in the Turkish attacks on the Kurds, that illegally engaged in the mining of Nicaraguan harbours (for which its was condemned by the World Court) and funded subversives against the Sandanistas throughout the 1980s, that invaded Panama and Granada, that funded Afghan fundamentalists, that subsidises Israeli conquest and pillage virtually without restraint.
That it has done and continues to do all this and, at the same time, arrogates for itself the right to speak of international law to the Arabs, is nothing short of stupefying, the modern equivalent of a Gulliver bellowing furiously at the very same tiny Lilliputians whose tactics and presence confuse and finally disable the lumbering giant.
Despite its size and power then the US has been forced to accept the realities of a world it does not, and can never completely control. Looking as shamefaced and embarrassed as the local bully who has been shown up by a firm, but understated school-teacher, Bill Clinton has in effect accepted Kofi Annan's compromise. The diplomacy has deterred the great war machine (perhaps only for a short time). But I would guess that the great days of the US in the Middle East are now definitively over. It is still true that its hegemony remains potent, but that it can continue to pretend that it can be all things to all parties, that pose has been shown for the miserable ruse that it has always been.
Like Gulliver before the King of Brobdingnag, its officials boast of its prowess at arms and intrigue, but stand revealed for the hollow sham its policy has now become, manipulated by the Zionist lobby, cajoled by a battery of journalists who still believe in the US's imperial mission (Tom Friedman, Jim Hoagland, A.M. Rosenthal, Fouad Ajami etc) but try to convince themselves that they are right when in fact they have always been proved wrong, and stupefied by a group of aging "strategists" like Henry Kissinger whose ideas are as relevant to the present as a balloon is to a jumbo jet.
One would wish, however, that our own part of the world had the mettle to benefit from this Gulliverian situation. Saddam, in my opinion, is too discredited and bloodied a leader to be anything more than a nuisance to his neighbours, and a horror to his long-suffering people. It seems to me irrelevant whether or not in this latest confrontation he "won" or "lost": his country destroyed and set back in its development for decades, if not generations, Saddam should do the decent thing and simply quit, although he is too stubborn and cowardly to do anything like that. I fear that many Arabs now hero-worship him, despite his immense profligacy and total incompetence.
Like many of his aging counterparts in the Arab world he will limp along indefinitely until another upstart will unseat him, and start a new process either of recovery or of further slippage. Without democracy or a shared vision, the Arab leaders find themselves reduced to hushed consultations, ritual meetings, financial deals that put off even longer the massive investments needed in education, health, and democratic practices. Faced with similarly depressing actualities, Swift made Gulliver finally confront himself as an unregenerate savage, a Yahoo, as Swift calls him, lectured to not by a wise human being, but by a whinnying horse.
In these dark times, it is not hard to go the whole way and condemn ourselves as a people for our congenital inability to get anything right. But, having seen the fortitude of Palestinian peasants and ordinary working people trying to fight more dispossession by Israeli settlers and army, I remain convinced that there is a battle and a cause to be served. Despite us. - Copyright Edward W. Said, 1998