"Saddam Hussein's greatest crime is that he brought the American army to Iraq."

These were the words of an elderly resident of Baghdad, Gailan Ramiz, as he tried to fend back a mob that was trying to tear down yet another Saddam statue at Shorji market, Baghdad's biggest. (1) The same sentiment was expressed by a 48-year-old oil engineer, Efil Adnan, who said: "The United States breaks into the palaces and then threatens all the people who steal from them. The United States is a liar," Adnan said. "They are not going to make anything better."

But the growing feeling of disgust and self-loathing was most aptly summed up by another Baghdad resident Fouad Abdullah Ahmed who said that "the army of America is like Genghis Khan. America is not good and Saddam is not good. My people refused Saddam Hussein, and they will refuse the Americans."

Following the scenes of looting and disorder that were beamed all across the world, we are left with the task of trying to make sense of it all. To compound our efforts is the need to come to terms with the destruction of Baghdad's museum of antiquities, home to more than 170,000 precious artefacts that go back to the beginnings of recorded human history, and the burning of Baghdad's library, which housed tens of thousands of precious books, including Qur'ans that date back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

Excuses, excuses

While the American government seems capable of moving tens of thousands of its soldiers from all over the world to invade Iraq, topple its government, destabilise its society and guard its precious oil fields, it has failed to show the same concern for the fate of the country's history and patrimony- a legacy that is not o­nly Iraq's, but also that of the entire human race.

The pro-American wannabes in our midst will undoubtedly be coming up with every excuse in the book to defend their American friends and patrons. Already we have been told that the looting and wanton violence and destruction in Baghdad is the fault of the Iraqis themselves, and that the Americans are not to blame. This was, we are told, an 'Arab problem' and the suggestion is that the Arabs are fundamentally a backward, violent and unstable people who cannot be brought to heel unless they have an M-16 pointed in their faces, or the boot of a US Marine o­n their necks.

But even the most simple minded and clueless among us should know that it is the responsibility of any victorious army to impose law and order as soon as it has vanquished its foe. This is, in fact, o­ne of the tenets of the Geneva convention and has been a cardinal rule of civilised warfare throughout the modern era. But then again, who said that America's illegal invasion of Iraq was a civilised matter in the first place?

The negligence shown by the US army administration thus far makes it guilty of criminal neglect. In the same way that o­ne is morally obliged to stop a crime if and when it takes place before o­ne's eyes, the Americans were obliged to step in and control the riots and looting in Baghdad and the other major cities of Iraq as soon as possible. Failing to do is akin to letting someone be robbed in the streets right in front of you, while sitting idly by and having a cigarette. Yet this is precisely what the Americans did: they sat, drank and smoked, while the mob set fire to the city of Baghdad in an orgy of self-loathing and inward contempt

Barbarians at the gate, barbarians within.

The elder statesman of Burma U Thant o­nce wrote:

"The enemy is not across our frontiers, but rather in the degeneration of ourselves." (2)

In the wake of the rape of Baghdad, the Western media (most notably the obsequious American press with its feel good stories) have gone to great lengths to not o­nly justify their illegal invasion of Iraq, but also to rationalise it o­n altruistic and humanitarian terms. To add insult to injury, the image of angry and frustrated Iraqis rampaging in the streets of Baghdad have been used to explain and analyse why such an invasion was necessary in the first place.

What 'civilising mission'?

The Iraqis- and all Arabs by extension have been pathologised, studied and diagnosed as fundamentally unstable, violent, irrational beings who seem unable to understand the rules of politics or the practice of democracy. The burning of the museum and library of Baghdad have been cited as proof, if any was needed, of the fundamental schizophrenic nature of the Iraqis, as if the entire nation suffered from a form of collective dementia or neurosis.

That such blatantly racist stereotypes can rear their ugly head today proves that the victory of the Americans is not merely a political o­ne, but also a cultural and ideological o­ne as well. We are witnessing not o­nly the emergence of an unfettered superpower that acts beyond the restrain of morality or ethics, but also o­ne that is supremely confident in itself and its claims to 'civilisation'. Yet what kind of 'civilising mission' is this, when American troops are more concerned with protecting barrels of oil than the real wealth of Iraq its cultural patrimony?

The fact that the Iraqis could have been blamed for the destruction of their own capital in the first place hardly comes as a surprise, for the American media had in fact a long record of anti-Muslim reportage that goes back well into the 1970s. As Edward Said has argued in his book 'Covering Islam'(3), the roots of anti-Muslim popular prejudice in the media goes back to the Orientalist era, when the Arab-Muslim world was cast as the negative Other to the West and all that was Western. If the 'West' is associated with progress, modernity, rationality and development, then the Muslim world had to be associated with all that was opposite by default.

Centuries of Orientalist scholarship in Western Europe had given birth to the inversed image of the Arab world as its mirror opposite: The Arabs were studied, dissected and diagnosed as backward, irrational, under-developed and their culture stagnant and out of time. Their beliefs were described as immoral, irrational, licentious and their culture decrepit and decadent.

That such scholarship emerged at a time when the European powers happened to be Imperial powers at the peak of their achievements is no mere accident.

The present neo-Conservative establishment lodged in the White House happens to be the inheritor of such ideas and prejudices, cultivated by a host of Eurocentric scholars ranging from Samuel Huntington to Francis Fukuyama, and so-called 'security experts' such as Steven Emerson and Rohan Gunaratna. If Neo-Orientalism is making a shameful comeback in American foreign policy and its expression o­n the stage of global politics, it is partly because such thinking has never been dislodged from the mindset of the neo-conservatives themselves, who still think, act and speak like their predecessors of the 19th century.

What is to be done?

Root of problem

During the lead-up to the attack o­n Baghdad city, an American Marine was reported to have said to the press: 'The Iraqis are a sick people and we are the chemotherapy.'

This skewered worldview, which sees other societies and cultures as problematic without being able to problematise and question itself, is precisely the root of the problem. The enemy here is not without, but rather within. If America has armed itself to the teeth and today celebrates a culture of violence and bloodshed (as clearly shown by the documentary-maker Michael Moore in his recent film 'Bowling for Columbine'), it is because this is a nation that is perpetually in the state of fear and anxiety. But why is America afraid?

Like it or not, the past catches up with us and as Malcolm X o­nce put it: "the chickens will ultimately come home to roost". Unlike the other ex-colonial powers of Western Europe such as Britain and France that have at least made some (albeit piecemeal) efforts to acknowledge their misdeeds and crimes in their colonies, America remains unrepentant and unable to look itself honestly in the face. As the truth about its dealing in countries like Iran, Indonesia, el Salvador, Pakistan, Honduras, Grenada, Cuba, Chile, Philippines, Vietnam, et al come to the fore, the nation that is caught perpetually in the eternal present simply denies its history and digs its head further into the hole in the ground.

Till today, we are learning more and more about America's crimes against humanity that have gone unacknowledged and unrecorded. A recent report produced by health and environmental experts at New York's Columbia University has shown that the Americans were guilty of using even more Agent Orange and cancer-causing poisonous defoliant agents during the Vietnam War, for instance.(4) But news like this is not likely to make the headlines in the USA today, as the country embarks o­n yet another bloody and violent misadventure abroad in order to conceal its own rot within.

It is left to us the unwilling victims of American 'benevolence' and 'altruism' to continue to cry out and protest as loud and clearly as we can, to insist o­n the illegality of American actions and condemn its increasingly violent and abusive unilateralism, for that is all that we can do. But words and ideas can and do change the world, and it must never be forgotten that the greatest empires of the past were laid low and brought down to earth by simple ideas and values such as democracy and human rights.

Dignity and respect

What we cannot and must not do, however, is accept and swallow the tirade of anti-Arab prejudice and slander that is now being presented to us as if it was scientific and thoughtful analysis. The charms of Orientalism have always been limited, and reserved o­nly for the powerful victors who lorded it over the conquered and defeated. But the Arab spirit remained and fought back, and the struggle for Arab dignity and self respect endures till today.

As people who were o­nce colonial subjects who were brought within the colonial order of knowledge and power, we have an obligation to resist this mental and intellectual indoctrination that is being fed to us in the form of news or news analysis.

Let the Bush administration don their white robes and pointed caps, and burn their crosses if they want to. The racism and prejudice of the White House today will ultimately be yet another page in America's black book of shameful sins of the past. Neo-Orientalism may be making a comeback in the corridors of power in the West, which o­nce again sees the Arab nations as fair game in the gamble of nations and superpowers. But it should not be allowed to rear its ugly head in the midst of objective scholarship and the critique of power emanating from the South.

Endnotes:

(1) New York Times (12 April 2003), Baghdad Seethes With Anger Toward U.S. (AP)

(2) U Thant, 'Respect for the Teacher', in The Burmese Review, reproduced in H. G. Trager (Ed.) We Are The Burmese: Voices from Burma. (New York, Praeger, 1969). We would like to thank Alijah Gordon for giving us this quote.

(3) See: Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. (Vintage Press, London, 1997.)

(4) See the report o­n BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2954729.stm According to the BBC report, the Columbia University team painstakingly examined operational records of individual spraying missions in Vietnam, and cross-referenced them with procurement records showing which kinds of defoliant were used at which times. They conclude that 77 million litres of Agent Orange were used - rather than 70m litres as has been estimated previously.