Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts

Friday, September 11, 2015

9/11

14 years ago today, my first day teaching in Providence, a day whose events and aftermath we all will be living and dealing with for decades to come.



Friday, December 16, 2011

Iraq War (Finally) Over + Hitchens Passes

Panetta, in Iraq
This is the way the war ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.  And though American troops are still there, though in severely reduced numbers, the Iraq War, one of the US's worst foreign policy and political blunders, has finally wound down to its sad end.  The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, yesterday traveled to Iraq to declare the military mission officially over.  Most of the troops and much US equipment and matériel are finally departing that shattered country, as per schedule (and through the haplessness of this current administration, a small favor in all its irony), after nearly a decade of tumult. I won't recite the litany of the war's costs, its destructiveness over its lifespan (or deathspan), and what it has bequeathed, to the US, Iraq, Iran, the rest of the Middle East, the globe, but the costs have, by most measures, been astronomically high, whether one cites the number of US and coalition troops killed or wounded, the toll on Iraq's citizens and the sea of refugees it has provoked, the political crisis that now plagues Iraq's government, the regional empowerment of Iran and destabilization of neighboring states, and on and on.

And still we have never had a thorough investigation of how the country ended up in this disastrous war; no investigation, let alone prosecution, of those behind it, despite the revelations of their lies and duplicity; no censures of any of the many ancillary dramatic personae, the Perles and Wolfowitzes and Chalabis and Judy Millers and on and on; no reprimands in or of the Congress that lay prostate before the war's architects; and no bulwarks to prevent another such disaster. Instead, the US has barreled forward into even more treacherous territory: wars without any Congressional oversight; bloated and rising military budgets; increasing privatization of military services and a strengthening of the military-industrial complex; and creeping un-Constitutional laws and alegal structures, such as wiretapping of US citizens without need of warrants, indefinite military detentions, extrajudicial killings of suspected "terrorists," including US citizens deemed such by the President or secret tribunals, and on and on. War without end is the permanent condition of our politics and polity.

As much as we might criticize many awful moments in US history, we also should recognize that where we are today is perhaps among the worst places, in terms of a complete mockery of the rule of law, as we've ever seen. And worse it gets, day by day, under a president who ran a campaign of changing the disasters this war not only symbolized, but embodied. His challengers are as bad or worse. Meanwhile, the soldiers are coming home, but to what?  And why were they ever over there in the first place?  Really? Beyond the "sea of oil" and the fanatical plans of PNAC, and the undying neoconservative dream of perpetual war against enemies near and far, so long as the neoconservatives themselves never have to go into combat, never have to witness their children being slain on foreign soil or sand or seas, never have to do much beyond rant into prose or a microphone, in coddled ideological seclusion, while the results of their febrile passions unfold in gory spectacle continents away.  The Iraq War has been a tragedy we have only begun to reckon; we won't know its final accounts, there, and here, for years to come.

***

Christopher Hitchens (David Levenson/Getty Images)
Speaking of ironies, on this very day, one of the Iraq War's staunchest supporters, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), died of esophageal cancer at the age of 62. The encomia for the British-born, American-naturalized former far-left, neoconservative-turned, Oxford-educated essayist and critic have, I noted from the time I signed onto Twitter yesterday, been steadily mounting. I was not and am not an admirer. Glittering prose and wit always have a place in my heart, but used to such devices as Hitchens did, especially over the decade of his life, left me cold.  His prodigiousness is worthy of citation; his charm, even when he was at his most repellent, was undeniable; his fearlessness at challenging the media's commonplaces, touchstones and darlings, like the silence around atheism, or the public characters known as Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Diana, Princess of Wales, was peerless, among his media set and many others.

Yet I also recall how awful he became on political matters in the United States, how he went after Bill Clinton and how he slavered over George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. What comes to mind is Paul Johnson's slashing description of the Young British Artists, adapted and shorn of Johnson's gross homophobia, to Hitchens, during his neoconservative state, which deepened into something much more and worse than a phase: brutal, horribly modish and clever-cunning, exhibitionist, loud-voiced and stone-fisted, aiming to shock and degrade, arrière-garde, and, as with those he so deeply championed, arrogantly, utterly and indefensibly wrong.  Hitchens, a self-described "Marxist" who made deep peace with global capitalism and its depredations, was unfortunately still unwilling to apologize for having championed the Iraq disaster even at the end of his life; fast as a magnet he held to his convictions. What awaits him is anyone's guess. It is no guess, however, that he probably knew by heart the following lines, and with them may he rest, wherever he's headed, in peace:

...But whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.
 Richard II, Act 5, Sc. 5, William Shakespeare.

Friday, February 11, 2011

“It’s the beginning": Egyptians Write Their Destiny

He's gone! As per the wishes of a majority of the Egyptian people, President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak today officially and fully vacated his office. An Egyptian military council is now (temporarily?) running the government, and though it unclear what will happen next, including with Omar Suleiman, the current vice president and former head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID), that country's CIA. But what is clear is that two and half weeks of sustained brave public protests by Egyptians, in Cairo, in Alexandria, in Suez, and other cities, and just a few weeks ago met with horrific violence by the government's supporters and agents, have resulted finally in Mubarak's ouster, after 30 years of dictatorship, with the wholehearted support, financial, political and military, of the United States and other Western nations. As I wrote in an earlier blogpost this year on the unfolding situation in Tunisia, the successful protesters there unleashed a political, social and discursive djinn that cannot be put back in the bottle. Mubarak's abrupt resignation today followed his defiance yesterday when, as protesters filled Cairo's Tahrir Square and Egyptians and international reporters expected him to step down, based in part on the military's public assurances, he announced on TV to widespread outrage that he wasn't going to bow to foreign pressure. But it was the military's hand, and the popular will, embodied by the millions of Egyptians of all backgrounds who refused to back down, that forced Mubarak out. (According to some unconfirmed reports, Egypt's federal legislature, dominated by Mubarak's party, has been dissolved.) Egyptians have been celebrating all day and, if the military keeps its promise, will continue to, no matter how messy and complicated the democracy that follows turns out to be, but people across northern Africa and the Middle East are now looking at their own dictator-despots and thinking perhaps their time is up as well. As for the dictator-despots, they also perhaps are considering that their longtime ally, the US, can just as easily cut them loose.  Perhaps we Americans will also take note and start refusing to stand by as our civil liberties are systematically and increasingly gutted; our hard-earned tax dollars end up in the financial casinos and underwrite the lavish lifestyles of corporate executives who think nothing of the workers of this country; war criminals walk the streets freely and give each other awards without the slightest fear of legal sanction; our Constitution continues to be gutted by people who believe that their wealth absolves them of the rule of law; and the executive, legislative and judicial branches work almost wholly on behalf of oligarchs and plutocrats, and thumbing their noses at the vast majority of us. May the people of Egypt continue to write their destiny with their own hands, and let us learn once again to do the same.
Ed Ou for The New York Times
Demonstrators in Cairo rejoiced Friday upon hearing that President Hosni Mubarak had been toppled after 18 days of protests against his government.