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Extraordinary renditions
By Jeff Sommers, Khaled Diab and Charles Woolfson
01/19/06 "Al-Ahram"
-- -- With Iraq embroiled in bloody mayhem
and Europe -- as well as most of the world -- up in arms at the
rising cost of the United States-led 'war on terror', American
foreign policy stands in the dock. The prosecution's case has
been articulately presented by
Harold Pinter, surprise winner of this year's Nobel Prize for
Literature. The playwright who
revealed reality in a distorted fragment of language, chose the
occasion of his award to confront the president whose language
reveals but a distorted fragment of reality.
From his wheelchair in the grand concert hall in Stockholm,
Pinter delivered a remorseless, rasping condemnation of US
foreign policy. What he said was not new. How he said it was, as
he cut into the dramaturgical underbelly of political rhetoric,
what he called the "voluptuous cushion of reassurance" in which
"language is actually employed to keep thought at bay".
In an ironic twist, the master wordsmith offered US President
George W Bush his services as a speechwriter. "We believe in
freedom. So does God," Pinter said on behalf of the world's most
powerful man. "I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian.
He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You
see this fist? This is my moral authority."
Pinter's performance was in the true meaning of these newly
corrupted words -- an 'extraordinary rendition'.
Bush certainly needs the services of his best word wizards.
Faced with mounting popular opposition at home, the president
recently made a desperate case for his overseas interventions.
Bush decided to use 11 November (Veterans Day in the USA,
Armistice Day in Europe) to mount his defence.
In an unconscious Pinteresque parody, the president beseeched
his audience to recognise the goodness of American foreign
policy and the inherent democratic character of the United
States on the world stage. 'Freedom', 'liberty', or 'liberation'
were incantations repeated no fewer than 23 times.
Lest we remember
Surrounded by serving officers and retired soldiers, the
commander-in-chief told his audience: "A handful of veterans who
live among us in 2005 stood in uniform when World War I ended 87
years ago today."
Some of these aged veterans may have been scratching their heads
in bafflement that their president was using their painful
legacy to defend his administration's stridently militaristic
foreign policy.
Ignoring the deafening echoes of history, Bush ploughed on: "At
this hour, a new generation of Americans is defending our flag
and our freedom in the first war of the 21st century." But he
should have paid heed to the voices of the 'lost generation' who
perished in the trenches of World War I.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
-- Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) From 'Suicide in the trenches'
Roused to arms
The 'war on terror', according to President Bush, was not one of
America's choosing. "The war came to our shores on September the
11th, 2001," he intoned. "We didn't ask for this global
struggle. But we are answering history's call with confidence
and with a comprehensive strategy."
Despite the apparent emotional rawness of his appeal, there
appears to have been little that was spontaneous about the 'war
on terror'. "It's insulting to believe that 9/11 was a turning
point that made of Bush an angry Greek god bent on destruction,"
observed veteran Egyptian journalist and political analyst
Mohamed Hassanein Heikal in an interview on Arab satellite TV
shortly before the invasion. "The American empire... is the most
powerful in the history of mankind and it's a power that plans
and does not improvise its policies -- it made think tanks an
industry."
Currently, the most influential and infamous of these think
tanks is undoubtedly the neo- conservative Project for a New
American Century (PNAC). In 1998, members of the PNAC, including
Donald Rumsfeld (current US secretary of defence) and Paul
Wolfowitz (deputy US secretary of defence at the time of the
Iraq invasion) wrote to then president, Bill Clinton, urging him
to remove Saddam Hussein from power using US diplomatic,
political and military power.
The old American century
Despite the more openly imperial, unilateral and militaristic
tone of the right-wing Bush doctrine, US foreign policy in the
Middle East has been surprisingly consistent.
Oil-rich Iraq has been an Anglo-American playground since it was
created by the British following World War I. "Our armies do not
come into your cities and land as conquerors or enemies, but as
liberators," British Major-General Stanley Maud proclaimed upon
entering Baghdad in 1917.
In 1953, in neighbouring Iran, the United States and Britain
sponsored the overthrow of the first democratically elected
leader of Iran, Mohamed Mossadeq, and propped up his successor,
the Shah, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi. Such adventures have the habit
of creating their own 'blowback'. The Shah's corruption and
oppression led to the student protests that toppled him in 1979
and paved the way for the Islamic republic. And it is, of
course, the US's traditionally unflinching support of Israel,
with its nuclear arsenal and belligerent military policy against
Palestinian aspirations for statehood, that strikes the deepest
emotional chord of outrage with the average Arab.
But these historical parallels are ignored by apologists and
quickly forgotten by the collective consciousness desperately
seeking to believe in the goodness of government. "The
nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed
by his own side," George Orwell once wrote, "he has a remarkable
capacity for not even hearing about them." In his classic novel
1984, Orwell expresses this willed blindness through the
perpetual oscillation of Oceania from eternal enemy to eternal
ally.
Green, the new red
In a bid to frame the situation in epic terms familiar to his
American audience and dehumanise the enemy, Bush drew a parallel
between Islamic fundamentalism and Communism. "Like the ideology
of Communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals
can be sacrificed to serve a political vision."
Islamists, who like fundamentalist Christians, regard Communism
as an 'evil' and 'godless' ideology may be surprised to hear
Bush's description. Despite the obvious ideological differences
and the power disparity (the Soviet Union was a superpower with
imperial designs, whilst Muslim extremists are small groups of
radical individuals), Islamists have served a convenient role
for US politicians.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to panic in the halls of
American power. Then the neo- conservatives found a way out,
when the movement's leading thinker, Daniel Pipes, followed the
lead of his 'cold warrior' father, Richard, and likened Islam to
the red threat.
The associative coupling of Islamism with Communism is a fairly
recent innovation. In past decades, Islamism was seen -- and
sponsored -- by Washington as a necessary and effective
counterbalance against the spread of Communism, the Soviet
empire, pan-Arabism, Nasserism, and other undesirable 'isms'.
Under friendly fire
As with all powerful states, America acts in its own perceived
strategic interests. As America and the world changes, so, too,
will its enemies and friends.
The USA has a long history of making friends with its future
enemies: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein
count among that illustrious group. Osama bin Laden, who, like
Bush, is the privileged son of an oil dynasty, was once the good
friend of the United States. Now the commander-in-chief has
turned his guns on this one- time ally in a repetitive mantra of
demonology.
For their part, bin Laden and other mujahideen believe that they
single-handedly toppled one godless superpower, and now they
have turned their sights on another.
Original sin and manifest destiny
But it is not just in the Middle East where American
expansionist policy has been consistent. For the United States,
it all began with the idea of 'manifest destiny' originally used
to justify the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population.
Andrew Jackson, president of the United States when the Cherokee
tribe were removed, never failed to remind the public that it
was being done for the Indians' own good. "It will be my sincere
and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within
our limits a just and liberal policy," he said in his first
inaugural address in 1829.
The Cherokee presented an interesting dilemma. It was declared,
with a sigh, that most Indians would be removed due merely to
the inexorable forces of progress. However, the Cherokee were
farmers, had developed a written language with a vibrant press,
and were even slave-owning plantation owners -- from the
perspective of the day, they were "civilised". Nevertheless, the
Cherokee had too much fertile land for cultivating cotton, and,
in 1830, gold was discovered on their remaining territory in the
Blue Ridge Mountains. By 1838, the last of the Cherokee were
infamously forced on the Trail of Tears death march.
Pacifying the Spanish threat
The Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 led to the annexation by
the United States of Texas and 40 per cent of Mexico. In his
inaugural address of 1845, President James Polk stressed that US
expansionism meant extending the "dominions of peace". "The
world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our
government... Our government cannot be otherwise than pacific,"
he insisted.
Polk got his neat military 'victory', but it ruined relations
with Mexico. "Allow the president to invade a neighbouring
nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion
... and you allow him to make war at pleasure," future President
Abraham Lincoln lambasted.
The entry into the Union of new slave states was blamed by some
for the subsequent American Civil War. "The Southern rebellion
was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war," opined another
future president, Ulysses S Grant.
Manufacturing consent
The next major innovation employed by the American government to
convince its public of the need for war was during World War I.
President Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 on the
platform of keeping America out of the dirty European trenches.
Wilson's message followed the American tradition dating back to
George Washington's farewell address of staying out of European
wars. However, Wilson wanted in. But he was faced with a
dilemma: how to turn public opinion? The answer was with the new
science of public opinion management which was pioneered by such
figures as Edward Bernays -- the double nephew of Sigmund Freud
-- who introduced such phrases as "engineering consent".
Woodrow Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information, also
known as the Creel Commission, to unleash a public relations
onslaught on the American public. It succeeded just enough to
keep Americans from rising up en masse against Wilson's
adventure.
The next major challenge to forge consent for US policy was with
the Cold War. President Harry Truman's advisors were convinced
of the need to place the United States on a permanent war-time
footing. After the Second World War, the US economy was
strangled by the post- demobilisation. Economists and
manufacturers alike were convinced America would sink into a
depression, and the Marshall Plan was partly in response to
this.
This, combined with the United States inheriting the global
system abandoned by the weakened British and French, placed the
fledgling superpower in a new role of world leadership.
Fear as a weapon of mass manipulation
The need to frighten American citizens into backing a permanent
war economy was detailed in National Security Council Document
68. The Communist -- and later Islamist -- threat had to be
magnified. President Dwight D Eisenhower warned in his departing
address that this military- industrial complex was out of
control. General Eisenhower's warning shot was not heeded and,
today, 'nation building' (preceded by 'nation dismantling') has
become the Bush administration's stock-in-trade.
"You have to hand it to America," Pinter praised mockingly. "It
has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide
while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a
brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." But
the spell, long broken abroad, is cracking at home.
Every ruling class attempts to impart immutable meanings in its
political discourse to 'key words', a term coined by Raymond
Williams, the great English cultural historian. 'Democracy',
'freedom', 'peace', 'global terrorism' can become tokens in a
fixed currency of discourse that does not acknowledge critical
interrogation. Only at rare historical moments, periods of
gathering crisis and discontent, does the full measure of this
linguistic violence perpetuated on complex realities become
apparent. What was formerly hidden is revealed; what was
'unsayable' finds popular voice. Such a moment of flux in the
rendition of the war on terror seems now to have arrived.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
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