War Foretold: Mark Twain and the Sins of Our Race

By Ramzy Baroud

0-6/17/07 " ICH" -- -- When I resorted to Mark Twain's writings I attempted to escape, at least temporarily, from my often distressing readings on war, politics and terror. But his "The Mysterious Stranger", although published 1916, still left me with an eerie feel. The imaginative story calls into question beliefs that we hold as a "matter of course" - a favorite phrase of his. It summons the awful tendencies of "our race": our irrational drive for violence, be it burning 'witches' at the stake or engaging in wars that only serve the "little monarchs and the nobilities."

As the Iraq war rages on, Twain's words ring truer by the day. "The loud little handful will shout for war. Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out shout them and presently the anti-war audiences will thin and lose popularity. Before long you will see the most curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men. And now the whole nation will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after the process of grotesque self-deception."

Twain, whose genius undoubtedly surpasses time and space, wrote the above passages nine decades before the world's leading statesmen, President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair forged their case for war, based on falsities and refused to examine any refutations; they rallied millions, investing on their ignorance and blind patriotism to carry out a war whose outcome is akin to genocide. The text was also written long before the thousands who stood for human rights, rallied and organized against the war, defended the constitution and civil liberties were "shouted out" and "stoned from the platform"; thousands of those "fair men" and women have endured such a fate, the latest being Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved American mother who lost her son, Casey, in Bush's war for oil, strategic repositioning of the empire and the neoconservatives' ceaseless hunt for Israel's illusive 'security'. She too was shouted out, and in a heart-wrenching letter, she reached the conclusion, most difficult for any mother to reach, that her son, Casey died for nothing.

But Bush is adamant to carry on with his costly endeavor that has espoused so many new chasms within his country, and in the world at large: religious contentions and political turmoil, damage that neither Mr. Bush, nor his most luminous advisors have the will nor the brains to remedy.

"But what does it amount to?" says Twain, using one of his story's characters, an angel to convey the idea: "nothing at all. You gain nothing. You always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense - to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not shamed of it, but proud."

Sheehan couldn't get an answer for why Casey was killed; many more might want to live with the illusion that their loss didn't go in vain; but dead American bodies continue to arrive back to US soil only at night; the wounded are maltreated and hidden from the public eye, only occasional courageous reports manage to break the silence and the perfected propaganda. In Iraq, the sheer number of dead and dying defies belief; the entire country is now gripped in an endless strife that shall define the cultural and social disposition of future generations; it's often easy to comprehend and come to terms with a total number of deaths when they are presented in a neatly packaged chart or a website, no matter how harrowing; but once you learn of the individual stories, you wonder whether the days of burning witches at the stake were better times: a young girl raped before her own family and later killed with her own baby; entire families massacred in broad daylight; militants chopping off limbs and ears and noses under the watchful eye of the Iraqi police, for their victims belonged to the wrong sect and stood on the wrong side of the war.

"The Mysterious Stranger" ended up being a figment of a little boy's imagination - or was it? - its meaning is overreaching and very much real. The war is real and frightening and hurtful; it's not an intellectual argument; it cannot be reduced to a few images and captions and editorials; nothing can ever capture a moment where a mother receives the corpse of a son or the scene of a father kneeling before the shattered body of a daughter. It's all real, and it's all our own doing, whether by supporting, financing and fighting the war, or by staying silent as it rages on.

-Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian author and journalist. His latest volume: The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press: London) is available at Amazon.com. He is the editor of PalestineChronicle.com and can be contacted at editor@palestinechronicle.com

The True Miracle of Israel

What is remarkable is not Israel's creation, but rather the perpetuation of the lies and the injustice upon which it survives
By Ramzy Baroud

27/01/08 "Ahram Weekly" -- -- Israelis and their supporters tend to depict Israel as a country of miracles. What else could explain the country's astonishing "birth" and subsequent survival against all sorts of "existential threats"? How else would Israel develop at such a phenomenal pace, making the "desert bloom" and continually scoring a high ranking amongst developed nations in most noteworthy aspects?

Meanwhile, Palestinians continue to be depicted as "their own worst enemies", a people who "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" and who stand outside the parameters of rational human behaviour. Israel is often, if not always, contrasted against a regional backdrop of "backward", "undemocratic" and essentially violent Arabs and Muslims.

Such depictions -- of luminous, civilised Israelis facing wicked, backward Arabs -- are the building blocks of a polemic sold tirelessly by Israeli, American and Western media. Most often, it goes unchallenged, thus defining the West's understanding of Israel and its moral "right to exist". The argument is rooted in the horrors of the Jewish holocaust; however, Israel's handlers have managed to turn deserved sympathy for that tragedy into an unwarranted assertion, somehow equating Palestinians with Nazi Germany in order to justify a constant state of war in the name of self-defence.

In this specific context, the power of the media cannot be over-emphasised. It has defined a fallacious reality based on a skewed narrative. Never in history has a story been so slanted as that of Palestine and Israel. Never has the victim been so squarely blamed for his own misfortunes as the Palestinian. This is not an arrogant counter-narrative to Israel's concoctions. It's a glaring truth that continues to be either ignored or misunderstood.

The "miracles" often associated with Israel are not random; they are assertions. Miracles are a religious notion, referring to the unexplained and supernatural. Thus they become exempt from rational questioning. This formula has served Israel's strategic purposes well. On one hand, Israel's existence is portrayed as a resurrection of sorts: from near-annihilation to a "miraculous" rebirth. Indeed, considering how the birth of Israel story is offered, the narrative is no less impressive than biblical legends. Such discourse has been used successfully to appeal to a much larger group than those who identify with Israel on ethnic or religious grounds. It has impressed tens of millions of Christian fundamentalists worldwide. In the United States, Christian Zionists represent the popular backbone of the pro-Israeli camp. While American Jews tend to vote based on economic or political interests, Christian Zionists see their allegiance to Israel as a religious duty.

Like all religious miracles, Israeli miracles are "matters of faith". They can either be accepted as one package or rejected as such; the bottom line is that they are beyond argument, beyond the need for tangible proof. Those foolish enough to deconstruct this -- and thus question Israel as a state accountable to law, like all others -- are subjected to the wrath of God (in the case of the "true believer") or the wrath of the media and the Zionist lobby (in the case of the sceptic). When an American politician, for example, is accused of not standing "fully behind Israel", the accusation doesn't warrant justification. It stands on its own, like a biblical command that has survived the test of time and reason: Thou shalt stand fully behind Israel. The accused politician can only defend his record of support for Israel; he cannot question why this is necessary in the first place, or ever acknowledge the fact that the latter's track record is soaked in blood, sullied by illegal occupations, and grounded on human rights violations and defiance of international law.

As the 60th anniversary of the so- called birth of Israel draws near, a most impressive -- albeit grotesque -- misrepresentation of that history will be offered in abundance. Media pundits and politicians will celebrate the miracle, omitting how Israel was delivered on top of the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages. The killing and ethnic cleansing that became known as the Palestinian Catastrophe -- or Nakba -- was not the work of invisible and miraculous seraphs, but rather well trained and well-armed Zionist gangs and their supporters.

Nor did Palestinians lose the battle due to their laxity or backwardness. Their bravery, for those who care to consult serious historical works (such as those of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe or late Palestinian Professor Edward Said), is a badge of honour that will be carried by Palestinians for years to come. They lost because, as parallel historic experiences demonstrate, neither bravery nor fortitude are enough to withstand so many powerful forces at play, all plotting for their downfall.

Moreover, those celebrating Israel's miraculous efforts in making the desert bloom -- the inference being that "nomadic Palestinians" failed to connect with the "neglected" land, and only the "return" of its rightful owners managed to bring about its renewal -- will most likely forget that its was the Palestinian proletariat -- the cheap, oppressed, and dispossessed labour force -- that mostly worked the land, erected the homes and tended to the gardens of the miracle state. No less than $100 billion of American taxpayers' money contributed to Israel's current economic viability, as well as military preparedness.

All of this is likely to be overlooked as Israel and "friends of Israel" around the world celebrate another miraculous year of survival and affluence. Will they pause to wonder why over five million Palestinian refugees are dispossessed and scattered around the world? Will they lend a moment's silence to the many thousands who were brutally murdered so that Israel could live this fallacious miracle? Will they ever understand the pain and the tears of successive generations dying while holding onto the keys of homes that were destroyed, deeds to land that was stolen, and memories of a once beautiful reality from which they were violently uprooted?

If there is any miracle in Israel's existence it is that the lies upon which it is founded could be perpetuated for so long, despite glaringly obvious truths to the contrary. Indeed, it is a miracle that such grave injustice could reign for so long uncontested.

* The writer is editor of Palestine Chronicle.com .

Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

 

Where Are The Iraqis in The Iraq War?

by Ramzy Baroud

March 30 2008

Five years after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, mainstream media is once more making the topic an object of intense scrutiny. The costs and implications of the war are endlessly covered from all possible angles, with one notable exception — the cost to the Iraqi people themselves.

Through all the special coverage and exclusive reports, very little is said about Iraqi casualties, who are either completely overlooked or hastily mentioned and whose numbers can only be guesstimated. Also conveniently ignored are the millions injured, internally and externally displaced, the victims of rape and kidnappings who will carry physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives.

We find ourselves stuck in a hopeless paradigm, where it feels necessary to empathise with the sensibilities of the aggressor so as not to sound “unpatriotic”, while remaining blind to the untold anguish of the victims. Some actually feel the need to go so far as to blame the Iraqis for their own misfortune. Both Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have expressed their wish for Iraqis to take responsibility for the situation in their country, with the former saying, “we cannot win their civil war. There is no military solution.”
It would have been helpful if Clinton had reached her astute conclusion before she voted for the Senate’s 2002 resolution authorising President Bush to attack Iraq. For the sake of argument, let’s overlook both Clinton’s and Obama’s repeated assertions that all options, including military ones, are on the table regarding how to “deal” with Iran’s alleged ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. But to go so far as blaming the ongoing war on the Iraqis’ lack of accountability is a new low for these “antiwar” candidates.

Is it still a secret, five years on, that the war on Iraq was fought for strategic reasons, to maintain a floundering superpower’s control over much of the world’s energy supplies and to sustain the regional supremacy of Israel, the US’s most costly ally anywhere?

Of course, there are those who prefer to imagine a world in which a well-intentioned superpower would fight with all of its might to enable another smaller, distant nation to enjoy the fruits of liberty, democracy and freedom. But it is nothing short of ridiculous to pretend that Iraqis are capable of controlling the parameters of the ranging conflict, that a puppet government whose election and operation is entirely under the command of the US military is capable of taking charge and assuming responsibilities.

Equally absurd is the insinuation that the civil war in Iraq is an exclusively Iraqi doing, and that the US military has not deliberately planted the seeds of divisions, hoping to reinterpret its role in Iraq from that of the occupier to that of the arbitrator, making sure the “good” guys prevail over the “bad”.

The idea of the US making an immediate exit from Iraq or taking full financial and legal responsibility for the devastation and genocide — yes, genocide — that occurred in the last five years is simply unthinkable from the viewpoint of the corporate US media, which still relates to the war only in terms of American (and never Iraqi) losses.

There are very few commentators who are actually arguing that the reasons for war were entirely self-serving, without an iota of morality behind them. Would Bush employ the same logic he used to justify Saddam Hussein’s execution — suggesting this was warranted by the Iraqi president’s violence against his own people — when dealing with those responsible for the deaths of over a million Iraqis as a result of this war?

And indeed Iraqis are dying in numbers that never subside regardless of the media and official hype about the “surge”. Just Foreign Policy says the number of dead Iraqis has surpassed one million, while a survey by the British polling agency ORB estimates the number at over 1.2 million. But the plight of Iraqis hardly ends at a death count, since those left behind endure untold suffering: soaring poverty, unemployment rates between 40-70 per cent (governmental estimates), total lack of security in major cities and, according to Oxfam International, four million in need of emergency aid.

“Baghdad has become the most dangerous city in the world, largely as a result of a US policy of pitting various Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups against one another. Today, Baghdad is a city of walled-off Sunni and Shia ghettoes, divided by concrete walls erected by the US military,” reports Dahr Jamail, one of the few courageous voices that honestly relayed the horrendous outcomes of the war.

Indeed, there seem to be no promising statistics coming out of Iraq. Even under the previous regime and the debilitating sanctions imposed by the US and the UN, Iraqis were much better off prior to the war. Now, Iraqis are relevant only as pawns of endless US government propaganda. From the viewpoint of Bush, McCain and Cheney, they are the victims of Al-Qaeda, which must be fought at all costs. From the viewpoint of Clinton and Obama, they need to fight their own wars and take responsibility for them, as if Iraqi “irresponsibility” is the main problem.

In yet another “surprise visit” to Iraq by a US official, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared that Iraq was a “successful endeavour”. Considering the exorbitant contracts granted to selected corporations, the war has indeed succeeded in making a few already rich companies and individuals a lot richer.
Meanwhile, Shlomo Brom, a senior fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies and former head of the Israeli army’s Strategic Planning Division, sees things from a slightly different angle. “Any Iraq will be better than Iraq under Saddam, because the Iraq of Saddam had the ability to threaten Israel,” he was quoted as saying in the Christian Science Monitor.

In considering such skewed logic, one can only hope that Cheney’s successful experiment will end soon, and that Israel’s desire for security is now sated. The people of Iraq cannot tolerate any more “success”.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).