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http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=18539
Of war, symbol and crawfish
By Fawaz Turki, Special to Arab News
A lot of trees will have to grow fast enough to produce the paper already used up in the public debate about whether or not the US should go to war against Iraq. We’re dealing here with a case of overload, of intellectual saturation, where you are driven to scream “Go to war already, for crying out loud!” because you don’t want to have to read the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” or hear it uttered in your presence one more time.
One of the sublime delights of discourse in the American media — though, unlike its more insightful counterpart in Europe, often characterized by a kind of haughty knowingness altogether too proud of itself — is that it’s a free for all.
Iraq, writes George P. Shultz, former secretary of state from 1982 to 1989, represents a danger that is immediate and Saddam must be removed. “If there’s a rattlesnake in the yard,” he opines colorfully, you don’t wait for it to strike before you take action.”
On the other end of the ideological spectrum — and we’re not talking Nation magazine here — Nicholos D. Kristof, senior columnist for the New York Times, wonders whether American arrogance, not to mention America’s unilateralist posture these days, is “returning the US to a Vietnam-style overoptimism and myopia.” Not a wise posture, he warns. Why? “Hubris kills.” Point well taken. And William Raspberry, another senior columnist, wrote recently in the Washington Post: “One sign of maturity is the ability to suffer outrage and gut-wrenching grief without going nuts. Days before America’s saddest anniversary since Pearl Harbor, Americans remain clearly — and justifiably — outraged, and our grief is palpable. But must we go nuts?”
And finally, with the debate leaving room as it often does for the middle ground, there is John F. Kerry, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, who says that war, in effect, must be a last resort, not a first step. “For the American people to accept the legitimacy of this conflict and give their consent to it,” he wrote in an op-ed last week, “the Bush administration must first present detailed evidence of the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and then prove that all other avenues of protecting our nation’s security interests have been exhausted.”
But why Iraq? Why now? If the issue is (and bear with me here) “weapons of mass destruction,” surely these are everywhere. They proliferate, for example, just down the road from the Iraqi border in Israel. You find them in North Korea. They are in plain view in Russia. And they exist in abundance in the United States — among other places.
There must be more to it than Iraq and its putative possession of these dreadful weapons. And if so, what is that?
It is clear that the events of Sept. 11 have changed America at its core, at a more seminal level than anyone wants to admit. Soon after the Twin Towers disappeared from the New York skyline, and the terrorists stabbed at the Pentagon, killing 185 people (their bodies so pulverized by the blast that not even part of a single human limb was recovered), the very collective psyche of Americans was changed, their view of the outside world given an emotionally charged context.
What happened that day was, in the full Jungian sense, a symbol that entered the essential repertoire of American consciousness, regrouping the American people’s apprehensions of who they are. And symbolic representations, like myths and legends, not only resonate in a culture, but they become a means of conceptualizing the world and defining identity. Sept. 11 was no different an iconic event in American history than, say, Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Consider how, as an example closer to home, the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and the dismemberment of Palestine in 1948, effected a profound change in our very inward preoccupations as a civilization, a change that continues to echo in our internal psychic economy to this day. For, keep in mind, for Arabs at the time it was more what those events represented symbolically, not the damage they wrought physically (Arab civilization survived intact both catastrophes) that changed us forever.
The symbols we harness in our lives as a human collectivity are among the subtlest and most direct languages of experience, re-enacting moments of signal revelation or crisis in the cultural archetype. In a way, they are a history of the unconscious, for note how, more than 900 years after the fact, we still bristle when the word “Crusades” is uttered in our presence, or how, more than half-a-century after the fact, the word “Zionism” continues to hit a sensitive chord in our emotional lexicon.
All of which brings us back to Iraq.
To be sure, the United States is too resilient a nation to have been destabilized, let alone mortally weakened, by the attacks against it that day. But those attacks were launched at a time when the US was at the plentitude of its power — the only power around, to be exact, after the Soviet Union had committed suicide on Christmas Day in 1991.
Not since the days of the Roman Empire had such a power gap existed between No.1 and the periphery. When you are a power like that, struck a blow like that, at a time like that, your immediate reaction is to hit with all your might. But to hit at shadowy terrorists with no nation or citizens to defend? A nebulous enterprise.
Your reaction is to assert, or more accurately, reassert, your power all the way from Moscow to Baghdad, and from the Balkans to Tora Bora, and show the world that you, the New Rome, can prosecute a war from 7,000 miles away, at Central Command, in Florida, thus dramatizing your ability for the kind of force projection that no nation in history has ever before come close to deploying.
There is no sense in pointing out to the administration that true leadership is not forged in bouts of petulance and hauteur, and that power is most effective when it is not demonstrated.
America is in a bad mood. And you ask, “Why Iraq?” Because it is there. Because, in what psychologists have come to call “displacement,” Iraq has come to embody all the evil that Americans see the outside world as harboring for them these days. We understand America’s grief on the first anniversary of that infamous day of terrorist carnage. We don’t understand its seeming commitment to translate that grief into an act of war launched in our region.
Another thing I for one do not understand is this: Last week, President Bush, leader of the free world, speaking from a public podium, produced another reason why war against Iraq is justified. Saddam Hussein, he said, “has crawfished his way out of every agreement. So, pray tell, had they stopped offering English courses at Yale? ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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