So they were, but none of those who called for the lifting of sanctions in whole or in part went on to say that troops should be sent in to remove the dictator from power. The option they supported, but rarely stated explicitly, was close to the option Saddam wanted: no sanctions and greater freedom for his dictatorship to perpetuate its rule.
Makiya saw at once that many on the liberal-left were prepared to turn their eyes from fascistic totalitarianism and realized the dismal consequences for the future. In 1993, he published Cruelty and Silence, which dissected the Arab intelligentsia’s unwillingness to confront its monsters. He took on Edward Said, whose Orientalism was and is a hugely influential account of how the West shaped the Middle East. Orientalism is a narrative of victimhood that finds in racist outsiders a comforting explanation for Arab backwardness. Makiya replied that if you placed all the blame for the region’s disasters on Western imperialism and racism, you ignored the home-grown disasters of Arab nationalism and Islamism. The unintended consequence was an inverted racism that denied the autonomy of Arabs and let local oppressors off the hook. Tyrants could always claim that the woes that afflicted their peoples came from America or Israel, and divert the anger that should have been directed against them.
Makiya said that for all their radical rhetoric, Said and those like him made ‘Arabs feel contented with the way they are, instead of making them rethink fundamental assumptions which so clearly haven’t worked’. India had been occupied by the British for several centuries, and Indians had far more reason to be angry than the Arab states, which had been occupied by the British and French for a few decades. Yet Indians got on with the struggle to build a successful democracy and economy, while Arab intellectuals were crippled by their resentments.
Said greeted the challenge with incontinent abuse. He sounded more like a Soviet prosecutor than an academic when he denounced Makiya as a ‘guinea pig witness’ and ‘native informant’ for the Americans. His former comrade was now ‘a man of vanity who has no compassion, no demonstrable awareness of human suffering’. His work was ‘revolting’, and based ‘on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation’. Westerners respected Makiya only because he ‘confirmed the view in the West that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists’.
Said was a Palestinian and in a small way his viciousness and betrayals of principle were excusable. For the early Zionists to say that Palestine was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ was not so much to look down on Palestinians from a position of colonial superiority, as to look through them and deny their existence. You can see why Makiya’s comparison of the thousands killed by the Israelis with the millions killed by the Baathists horrified him. Said had an urgent interest in keeping anger and attention directed at the Israeli occupation of Palestine. If it turned to other horrors, which had little to do with the West, the Palestinian cause might suffer.
Yet to use this excuse is to sink into the racism of low expectations – he’s a Palestinian and so we can’t expect too high a moral and intellectual standard. Said summed up his own failure to confront totalitarianism, and with it the failure of a large section of the Arab intelligentsia, just before the war in Iraq and his own death.
He said the war was all the fault of … oh, go on, guess.
Iraq ‘was the one Arab country with the human and natural resources, as well as the infrastructure, to take on Israel’s arrogant brutality’, he explained. ‘That is why Begin bombed Iraq pre-emptively in 1981, supplying a model for the United States in its own pre-emptive war.’ (He meant the Israelis’ destruction of the Tammuz nuclear reactor, which was going to give Saddam the bomb.) Because Said believed Saddam could one day have the men and munitions to take on Israel, the war against him had to be the result of a sinister plot by Jewish puppet masters who pulled the strings of American policy. The Jews operated with impunity, he explained, because corporate media covered up their crimes by failing ‘to elucidate the Likud’s slow takeover of US military and political thinking about the Arab world’.
Although the Israeli government was far more worried about Iran than Iraq, there were supporters of Israel in Washington who believed that a democratic Iraq would inspire revolutions across the Arab world. If they resulted in democratic governments, they reasoned, the pressure on Israel to cut a deal with the Palestinians would be reduced. The wacky and frankly insulting assumption behind their thinking was that Arabs would abandon the Palestinians if they were given a free choice in democratic societies.
Said’s underlying assumptions weren’t so different from the friends of Israel on Capitol Hill. He saw Saddam’s Iraq only as a potentially powerful enemy of Israel with ‘the human and natural resources’ to take Jerusalem on. The Americans must not overthrow Saddam because the toppling of the dictatorship would weaken the Palestinians’ hand. Said’s line of reasoning led to the conclusion that Iraqis must live under tyranny so that Palestinians might be spared the Israeli occupation – some Arabs must be in bondage so that others might be free. This was a counsel of despair and a scandalous one at that. What was wrong with supporting freedom for Palestinians and Iraqis and Syrians, Saudis and Egyptians for that matter?
Writing in 1997, Makiya tried to be generous. He saw that he and Said shared a common delusion. Campaigners against oppression have a temptation to identify with its victims because ‘one needs some kind of moral assurance, some handle on the hellishness of the world, in circumstances where God and religion are undeniably absent (at least for me)’. The alternative was ‘a descent into the nausea and misanthropy and self-hatred about whose destructive possibilities this century has taught us everything we need to know’. However, Makiya conceded that support for victims could lead to an idiotic myopia. There were Arab intellectuals ‘who so idolised Palestinian victimhood that they became blinded to the nature of the regime in Iraq’. He admitted, the same could be said of his idolization of Iraqi victimhood. Both Palestinians and Iraqis were:
allowing ourselves to believe that there is something morally redeeming in the quality of victimhood itself. There isn’t. The very opposite is likely to be the case: the victims of cruelty or injustice are not only no better than their tormentors; they are more often than not just wanting to change places with them. That has been the experience of Israelis, particularly since they became an occupying power in 1967, and it has been the experience of Palestinians and Kurds under self-rule in recent years.
The Bertrand Russell whom his mother had dragged his father to hear in the Forties was more succinct when he mocked ‘The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed’. Russell said that for too many right-thinking, left-leaning people it wasn’t enough to assert that oppression was an evil which destroyed its victims. The oppressed’s experience of oppression had to ennoble them. Their leaders had to become titans, their poets geniuses and their fighters heroes. The point of honest politics is to end oppression and allow its victims to be like everyone else. The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue implied that victimhood was morally invigorating, so the more of it there was the better.
You only have to glance at a newspaper or turn on the television to learn that Russell’s fallacy has spread like bindweed through a well-manured flowerbed.
Both Makiya and the British and American forces would have done well to think about it before the invasion of Iraq – so would I and other supporters of the war. Makiya realized it wouldn’t be easy. ‘Iraq was a state whose legitimacy was derived from impossibly intertwined circles of complicity and victimhood,’ he wrote long before the invasion. The post-Baathist future was ‘going to be like walking a tightrope, balancing the legitimate grievances of all those who have suffered against the knowledge that if everyone is held accountable who is in fact guilty, the country will be torn apart’.
In the Nineties, however, the ranks of those outside Iraq who wanted to overthrow the Baath Party were thin. The Berlin Wall was down and the terrors of the twentieth century