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The Iraq Syndrome: Demonic victims and angelic demons

In launching the war against terror (which has now been expanded to include Iraq), George W Bush declared that ‘Ours is a war against terrorism and evil’ and that ‘we will rid the world of the evildoers’. This war against demons has long antecedents. In fact, ever since it commenced its expansionist thrust 500 years ago, the West has consistently refused to respect the Other or to be hospitable to its rights to co-exist with it on planet earth. This is a significant aspect of its demented psyche that will continue to generate unnecessary wars for decades to come, says Claude Alvares.

IF God did not exist, we would have to invent him, wrote Voltaire, the great wit and philosophe of the French Enlightenment. But what about demons? Don’t we need them as well? Can we exist without the devils that drive us to do the things that humanity would find it difficult to associate with? How are genocides and holocausts generated? What feeds these devils?

These are questions blowing in the wind, as the United States government continues to spew venom at the pitiable people of Iraq and to prepare for war. It is not enough that in 1991, the US flattened much of the country over a period of 42 days by means of the most intimidating technological war machine the planet has ever seen since Vietnam. Now the intention appears to be to bring down whatever is left: leader, people, economy, everything, after a decade of harsh sanctions have taken their toll. It could almost happen, as normal people are generally incapable of dealing with actions of individuals who are driven by demons and who therefore see demons everywhere. And there is no lunatic asylum on the planet that is large enough to contain all the inmates of the Pentagon.

So if Iraq did not exist, the West would be forced to invent it. Western history is fairly littered with the consequences of the ‘Iraq Syndrome’: the earnest desire to unilaterally do away with classes of people who, simply by their very existence or presence, trouble the allegedly righteous, even when they are very far removed - often by very large oceans and seas - from their borders. The syndrome I am referring to has a very long innings in the development of the Western culture, one which stretches back more than 500 years in its history. There appears to be no method known as yet to deal with such a condition except perhaps constant exposure to a critical consciousness.

Large-scale violence

The most astonishing feature of the syndrome is the scale of the anti-personal, almost murderous violence that it allows or sanctions. Anyone who doubts that this is an intrinsic, inherent feature of the very soul of the West ought to take time out to study the experience of the Crusades which did not involve people from the ‘New World’ and which in fact preceded the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama.

The Crusades truly commence the pattern of large-scale international Christian violence against all unbelievers that bears its fruit in the ruins of Tenochtitlan and now Baghdad. The first major slaughter of so-called unbelievers (demons) was effected in the spring of 1096 shortly after the First Crusade was preached by Pope Urban II at the end of November 1095.

It was not directed against the Muslims but against the Jewish communities at Worms, Mainz and Trier. The Jews were followed shortly thereafter by the Albigensians, the ‘Saracens’, then witches, the Amerindians, Africans, Indians, Chinese, the Japanese (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the Vietnamese, the Afghans and now Iraq.

In one of the more significant victories associated with the Crusades, the city of Antioch was razed to the ground and all its inhabitants annihilated to the last infant. Then followed the assault on Jerusalem itself (1099), where, in the words of the Archbishop of Tyre:

‘Regardless of age and condition, [the Crusaders] laid low, without distinction, every enemy encountered. Everywhere was frightful carnage, everywhere lay heaps of severed heads, so that soon it was impossible to pass or to go from one place to another except over the bodies of the slain. Already the leaders had forced their way by various routes almost to the centre of the city and wrought unspeakable slaughter as they advanced. A host of people followed in their train, athirst for the blood of the enemy and wholly intent upon destruction.’

Even the victors experienced sensations of horror and loathing:

‘It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked on them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished, in addition to those who lay slain everywhere throughout the city in the streets and squares, the number of who was estimated as no less.’

But it went on:

‘The rest of the soldiers roved through the city in search of wretched survivors who might be hiding in the narrow portals and byways to escape death. These were dragged out into public view and slain like sheep. Some formed into bands and broke into houses where they laid violent hands on the heads of families, their wives, children, and their entire households. These victims were either put to the sword or dashed headlong to the ground from some elevated place so that they perished miserably. Each marauder claimed as his own in perpetuity the particular house which he had entered, together with all it contained. For before the capture of the city the pilgrims had agreed that, after it had been taken by force whatever each man might win for himself should be his forever by right of possession, without molestation. Consequently the pilgrims searched the city most carefully and boldly killed the citizens.’

The next clearest illustration of this blood-soaked spiritual plight of the Western world before it reached out beyond itself - still wrestling with its demons - into the wilderness beyond the ocean through the so-called voyages of discovery is the violence of the Inquisition which was visited against over a million people. The Inquisition and its methods were simply assumed to be for the benefit of the victim, there being absolutely nothing worse than living outside the life of the Church.

By the 16th century and the Reformation, the full force of the violence had been unleashed and the ‘enemies’ burned by the thousands. A bishop of Geneva (Frederick Turner informs us in Beyond Geography) burned 500 in three months. A Bamberg bishop burned 600. A bishop of Wurzburg, 900. In 1586 the spring was late and its warmth weak in the Rhinelands; nature’s powers to be renewed had obviously been tampered with by demons. Thus the Archbishop of Treves burned 118 women and two men in these fires of spring.

As Christopher Columbus set sail, the Indies would become for him and his successors just a new battle ground for a new Crusade. They would blunder into the ‘New World’ but with their old demons intact. They would leave it littered with dead bodies, millions of them. In Iraq, in 1991, the US Army left behind over 150,000 dead or wounded. And when Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, was asked her opinion of the needless deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to the sanctions imposed on that country merely to penalise its leader, she passed them off as ‘collateral damage’.

The issue of whether people other than Europeans (‘the Other’) were a) human beings and b) to be treated as human beings, or slaves, or expendable material, was discussed widely in Europe after the discovery of the existence of the Arawaks and the Taino, the people Columbus first encountered. If they were indeed human beings like the Europeans, endowed with souls, they would have to be treated with the same respect as citizens back home. But if this were insisted upon, the readiness to cheat, slaughter, kill, plunder, steal and enslave would have little or no justification. Eventually, we all know, Columbus and his followers  denied all humanity to the innocent people they discovered. In fact, they went further. They actively demonised them, charging them with cannibalism and other unchristian conduct. By dehumanising one’s enemies, one makes their deaths seem eminently acceptable.

Likewise, in North America, the American Indian population there was rapidly mowed down after they were bestowed any number of choice epithets that indicated they were less than human and fit to be slaughtered in what David Stannard has aptly labelled ‘the Red Holocaust’.

Ultimately the violence brought down the indigenous population of the Americas from some 120 million to under a few million.

In Ronald Takaki (Iron Cages), one will find an elaborate description of the manner in which the blacks imported as slaves to the US were equally demonised, in order to justify their continued bondage and exploitation. How many perished in the great slave trade that uprooted major areas of Africa of settled populations and sacrificed them to the greedy demons that drove Christian civilisation? The world will never know. The abducted Africans were not individuals, but mere numbers, since they really had no souls.

Eventually, the colonial period sustained an almost permanent dehumanisation of the colonised. Hundreds of texts portray the colonised and the coloured in the most despicable of terms. If testimony be needed, read John Stuart Mill or William Wilberforce or Katherine Mayo or Rudyard Kipling. Or the anthropologists. The list is truly unending.

And then, just as the colonial period ended, and demonisation would no longer be acceptable to the liberated folk (they might be offended and that could affect business!), it donned a new form, a new label more acceptable to all.  A US President in 1949 coined a new term, ‘undeveloped countries’. By this simple act of labelling, millions of people once again were put at a fresh disadvantage: once again they found they had lost their inherent worth as human beings, and despite their rich cultures and civilisations, were transformed overnight into backward individuals, in need of special training, attention and financial assistance to grow into acceptable material. Any person with any other religion, culture or civilisation different from the Christian West was to be considered ipso facto undeveloped or underdeveloped and in permanent need of tuition to become normal and civilised.

New demons

The features of the ‘Iraq Syndrome’ are not even really very specific to Iraq: they can be found repeated ad nauseam elsewhere, with the Soviet Union, with Panama, with China (remember, for many years, the ‘Yellow Peril’). Shortly after World War II, for example, British and American leaders put out news of an imminent Soviet threat to invade and destroy democracy in Western Europe. ‘Uncle Joe’ was transformed overnight into Stalin the Butcher and Winston Churchill coined the graphic image of ‘the Iron Curtain’.

Thereafter, the Soviet Union and its main ideology, communism, was vilified as the Devil himself. The fear of communism was converted into a general hysteria against all communist regimes and communists. The resulting Cold War disturbed the peace of the planet for well nigh 45 years, dragging within its troubled borders almost every other country on the earth and creating fresh battlefields in places as far away as Vietnam and Cambodia! It also led to the creation of a military-industrial complex which itself threatened democracy in any part of the world if that democracy did not toe the opinion of the United States (witness, Nicaragua, Chile), and generated a huge arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that the principal parties themselves one day realised was probably an indicator, not of their strength, but of their collective insanity and neurosis.

What were the facts on the basis of which the US and Europe were able to demonise the Soviet Union? The USSR had come out of the war with more than 20 million dead and 20 million more wounded; around 200 hundred cities had been demolished. There were enormous food shortages that gripped vast sections of the population. Soviet troops in fact had no boots. But on this skimpy base was adroitly raised the gigantic spectre of the Red Menace! Huge military alliances were created out of scratch: NATO, SEATO and CENTO. Hundreds of institutions were set up to swing people’s minds everywhere in favour of democracy and freedom and to demonise everything related to communism. Planes flew missions round-the-clock  over the planet with nuclear payloads, inspiring Hollywood scriptwriters and war films. Despite the fact that the ‘Red Menace’ has been officially interred, the institutions and the treaties continue!

It is surprising, indeed, to discover how easily a demonisation process can be initiated, maintained and milked in today’s modern world. But it must be conceded that no body can demonise as successfully as the US government (particularly its defence department) working in close tandem with elite news reporters and news agencies, planting stories and creating instant campaigns, so that we are all, avid consumers of Western media, are convinced of the bona fide nature of the actions called for, and can concur and acquiesce in their righteousness. Millions of people eagerly turned on their TV sets during Operation Desert Storm - and 10 years later - during the assault on Afghanistan, to witness the war machine’s awesome pyrotechnics and to participate vicariously in the downing of the demons extraordinaire, even though the demons would never be found - if we follow conventional Christian mythology - in the flesh. Few stepped back to reflect that only a demon of the most monstrous proportions could have fabricated the gigantic and mindboggling killing machine that was let loose against a defenceless Iraqi population. The massiveness of the arsenal displayed by the US military indicated just how large indeed was the security hole in the psyche of America.

The demonisation of Iraq does not differ in any significant sense from the earlier successful demonisations of the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese or the Chinese. The Taino and the Arawak had to be demonised so they could be removed without ceremony and their gold misappropriated. In Iraq, the issue continues to be the expropriation of gold - black gold, or oil. Most people, even fairly educated ones, do not know how much the present tirade against Iraq is based on the fact that this devastated country sits on one of the world’s largest oil reserves. The US has always been fearful that if Iraq became a regional power, it might forever endanger access to the oil reserves of the Middle East.

‘Regardless of whether we say so publicly,’ said Anthony H Cordesman, of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, ‘we will go to war, because Saddam sits at the centre of a region with more than 60% of all the world’s oil reserves.’

A draft plan prepared by the Pentagon to prevent the emergence of rival powers in the world and reported in the New York Times on 9 March 1992, stated candidly: ‘In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.’

This was little more than a follow-up to the 1980 Carter Doctrine which stipulated that the US will intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf region to protect US access to oil resources. To implement this doctrine, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF)was formed in October the same year. This was also the year in which Iraq invaded Iran with the tacit approval of the United States. Almost as a reward, in 1982, Iraq was removed from the US Government’s list of countries that support terrorism. In 1983, the RDJTF took on unified command status and became the US Central Command (CENTCOM).

The same year, Reagan selected Donald Rumsfeld, a prominent double-speak Republican, as his emissary to Iraq to explain to Saddam that while the United States could not openly condone Iraq’s use of poison gas, it would look the other way because Washington wanted to prevent an Iranian victory. 

Rumsfeld, the highest-ranking US official to visit Baghdad in six years, met Saddam and discussed ‘matters of mutual interest’. Twelve days after the meeting, the Washington Post reported that the United States ‘in a shift in policy, has informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be contrary to US interests and has made several moves to prevent that result’.

Rumsfeld returned to Iraq in March 1984. On the day of his visit, UPI reported from the United Nations: ‘Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq, a team of UN experts has concluded... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz on the Gulf war before leaving for an unspecified destination.’

The day before Iran had put out the news that Iraq had launched chemical weapons, injuring 600 of its soldiers. Prior to the UN report, the US State Department itself had issued a statement saying that ‘available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons’.

Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq when the UN report and the State Department notice were issued, but said nothing about the allegations of chemical weapons use. The New York Times, on the contrary, reported from Baghdad on 29 March 1984 that American diplomats were satisfied with relations between Iraq and the US. And in fact, in November the same year, full diplomatic relations between the US and Iraq were restored, enabling Saddam to go on a spree of defence purchasing from the US. The purchases included Hughes and Bell helicopters.

In 1988, Saddam’s forces attacked Kurdish civilians with poisonous gas using helicopters and planes. US intelligence sources told the Los Angeles Times in 1991 they ‘believe that the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs’.

On 18 August 2002, Patrick Tyler confirmed in a report in the New York Times that Reagan, Bush (the elder) and their top advisers had indeed provided logistical and intelligence information to Iraq. Tyler underlined that a US official had stated explicitly - after touring the battlefield area in 1988 - that ‘the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern.’

In the meanwhile, General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr was named head of CENTCOM in 1987. While the world went about its routine business, the US got its act ready. As Schwarzkopf Jr took charge, the US continued its hostility to Iran, bombing Iranian oil platforms, and financing Iraq. The following year (1988), with substantial advice, manpower, intelligence, loans and weapons from the US, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Britain, France and West Germany, the war tipped in favour of Iraq. Thereafter came the ceasefire between the two countries.

Immediately after the ceasefire, the Iraqi regime was identified as the new potential enemy of the United States. Till today the US has never provided any explanation why US policy suddenly switched from being pro-Saddam in the 1980s to anti-Saddam in the 1990s. However, a War Plan conceived in 1981 to deal with a Soviet threat to the Persian Gulf was now adjusted to designate Iraq as the new threat to the region. CENTCOM tested the new plan in the form of a computer game called Internal Look at headquarters. The sudden switch in allegiance was so stunning it would have startled the imagination of George Orwell.

The next stage of course would be the demonisation of Saddam Hussein. When the US government decides to attack a country, it first starts a campaign to get public backing for its morbid actions by blackening the country involved. In 1989, General Manuel Noriega of Panama, a former CIA agent, refused to assist the United States sufficiently in its Contra War against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Within weeks, the media stopped treating this former client with respect and instead began to list his devilish activities. Noriega was shortly thereafter abducted and incarcerated in the US as a common drug dealer. Both the mainstream and the elite American press has joined, with few exceptions, every such case of vilification it has been asked to support.

The demonisation of Saddam Hussein would come in two phases. The first phase was achieved in the rapid space of just one month in August 1990 and was related to the Iraqi attack on Kuwait. Ramsey Clark has a graphic description of the process in which the American media cooperated with great enthusiasm:

‘On 9 August Marjorie Williams wrote an article in the Washington Post describing press vilification of Saddam Hussein. The headline was 'Saddam Hussein: Monster in the Making'. The subtitle was 'From Unknown to Arch-Villain in a Matter of Days'. Later Jack Anderson wrote a syndicated column entitled 'The Demonization of Saddam Hussein' in which he described CIA and DIA efforts 'to see who can trump whom with the most outrageous Saddam story'. Among the contenders were the claim that Saddam Hussein was a murderer at age 10, that he preferred to shoot victims in the back, and that he kept a vat of acid to dispose of the bodies. President Bush set the tone by comparing Hussein to Hitler. The New Republic took the cue and ran a doctored cover photo of the Iraqi leader with a Hitler mustache. On 7 August, liberal columnist Mary McGrory referred to him as a 'beast'. By 20 August Saddam Hussein had become a 'monster' to Newsweek. Time magazine was more dramatic, writing, 'On first meeting him, a visitor is first struck by his eyes, crackling with alertness and at the same time cold and remorseless as snake eyes on the sides of dice. They are the eyes of a killer.' Columnist George Will wrote, 'It is tempting, but misleading, to compare the strutting Saddam Hussein to Mussolini. . . . Hussein radiates a more virulent and personal viciousness than Mussolini did.' Later Will decided 'Saddam Hussein is not Hitler, but the dynamism of his regime is Hitlerism.' During the war, on 24 January, CBS correspondent Alien Pizzey labelled Hussein 'psychologically deformed'. The media saturated the country with such presentations. Few public figures dared suggest that Saddam Hussein or even the Iraqi people might be human.’

To convince the public of his malevolence, came the incubator story, the most atrocious of them all. A 15-year-old-girl introduced only as ‘Nayirah’ was brought to testify to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus on 10 October 1990 that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and ‘leaving them on the floor to die’. Bush repeated the story in numerous speeches, claiming that 312 babies had died in this way. Amnesty International also passed the story as true in a report it did on 19 December 1990. After the war, Amnesty retracted the report. It was found to be completely fabricated, with ‘Nayirah’ turning out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, a fact known to those at the Congressional hearing.

This first phase of demonising was simply directed against Saddam Hussein personally, comparing him to Hitler and calling for his assassination and the like. The press had really nothing demonic to say about the Iraq population. It did mention the one-million strong army which turned out later to be a fake, just as many other stories, including the Kuwaiti babies and their incubators. The successful demonisation enabled the US, however, not just to blast Iraq back to the Middle Ages, but to impose sanctions that crippled the Iraqi economy and caused untold suffering to its population. The world, which had swallowed the demonisation package, simply sat and watched the unfolding tragedy.

After the elder Bush had Iraq almost completely destroyed in 1991, George W Bush (Jr), flush from his unchallenged assault on Afghanistan to capture the Osama demon, felt he could do the same with Iraq as well: apparently the demons that had troubled the father had now taken charge of the son. But for this fresh Crusade, Saddam had to be demonised all over again, charged this time with even more outrageous felonies.

The allegations this time included Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to Al Qaeda terrorists and his capacity to launch weapons of mass destruction. Of the first, despite stories planted in the media of visits of Osama to Baghdad, there was no evidence. The second was even more incredulous. We were now expected to believe that this devastated nation, like Soviet Russia in 1947, with 500,000 of its children dead, bereft of industry, subject to harsh sanctions for more than a decade, had insidiously raised itself as a threat to the largest military power the world has ever known, just like Afghanistan, primitive Afghanistan, had assumed a similar status barely a year earlier. Such charges can only be explained by a theory of demons. Could empty deserts and ruined economies really constitute threats to the most heavily safeguarded economy of the world? Was this for real? Or was this all a fa¨ade for grabbing a ‘strategic resource’?

In addition, the Administration orchestrated the media to change key facts about the past to make Saddam look more evil. In 1998, the media had reported that the UN had ordered its UNSCOM inspectors to leave Iraq immediately because the US Government had warned it that they intended to bomb the country and did not want to kill the inspectors. In 2002, the same media was now saying that Saddam had kicked out the UNSCOM inspectors in 1998. The media also put out administration-inspired stories that Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate the elder Bush when he visited the Persian Gulf in 1993!

The world is yet to be shown any evidence that Saddam has actually accumulated mass destruction weapons. Former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter declared that Saddam’s ‘large-scale weapons of mass destruction had been fundamentally destroyed or dismantled by the weapons inspectors as early as 1996, so by 1998 we had under control the situation on the ground’.

Yet the second demonisation has been almost successful because despite Iraq’s best efforts, it is still considered guilty. Donald Rumsfeld insists that ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. It’s all about giving a dog a bad name so that we can then proceed to shoot it.

Surely it must be cheaper, less bloody and destructive for our world to deal with the continuing psychopathology of the Western mind than to attempt to protect peoples from the consequences associated with its mala fide actions. How to do so is the question. This is a civilisational disease we are talking about. To exorcise its demons will take considerable time. The demons have remained steadfast and well in control now for well nigh half a millennium. Unless we can treat this malaise with some ingenuity, we shall continue to be faced with new eruptions of the Iraq Syndrome, where the victims are demonised as a cloak to conceal the psychopathology of the rich. At the moment, it appears that the only treatment available is exposure, of which there is not enough at all - of the true hideousness of this aspect of the history of the West.

The problem the globe faces today is not Iraq, but the United States. When the US Senate passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, Senator Wayne Morse made a statement about its impact on the US which we would do well to recall. He said: ‘We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that’s going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in South-East Asia.’ And we might add: ‘And in the Middle East as well.’

Claude Alvares is editor at the Other India Press, Goa, India and author of Decolonising History and Science, Development and Violence.

 


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