[Assam] Some TRUTHS from the NY Times

[Chan Mahanta]

  Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth


By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Published: January 5, 2007


London

Edel Rodriguez


ONE of the pop heroes of the Iraq war was 
undoubtedly Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, the 
unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in 
his daily press conferences during the invasion, 
heroically denied even the most evident facts and 
stuck to the Iraqi line. Even with American tanks 
only a few hundred yards from his office, he 
continued to claim that the televised shots of 
tanks on the Baghdad streets were just Hollywood 
special effects.

In his very performance as an excessive 
caricature, Mr. Sahhaf thereby revealed the 
hidden truth of the "normal" reporting: there 
were no refined spins in his comments, just a 
plain denial. There was something refreshingly 
liberating about his interventions, which 
displayed a striving to be liberated from the 
hold of facts and thus of the need to spin away 
their unpleasant aspects: his stance was, "Whom 
do you believe, your eyes or my words?"

Furthermore, sometimes, he even struck a strange 
truth - when confronted with claims that 
Americans were in control of parts of Baghdad, he 
snapped back: "They are not in control of 
anything - they don't even control themselves!"

What, exactly, do they not control? Back in 1979, 
in her essay "Dictatorship and Double Standards," 
published in Commentary, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 
elaborated the distinction between 
"authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes. This 
concept served as the justification of the 
American policy of collaborating with right-wing 
dictators while treating Communist regimes much 
more harshly: authoritarian dictators are 
pragmatic rulers who care about their power and 
wealth and are indifferent toward ideological 
issues, even if they pay lip service to some big 
cause; in contrast, totalitarian leaders are 
selfless fanatics who believe in their ideology 
and are ready to put everything at stake for 
their ideals.

Her point was that, while one can deal with 
authoritarian rulers who react rationally and 
predictably to material and military threats, 
totalitarian leaders are much more dangerous and 
have to be directly confronted.

The irony is that this distinction encapsulates 
perfectly what went wrong with the United States 
occupation of Iraq: Saddam Hussein was a corrupt 
authoritarian dictator striving to keep his hold 
on power and guided by brutal pragmatic 
considerations (which led him to collaborate with 
the United States in the 1980s). The ultimate 
proof of his regime's secular nature is the fact 
that in the Iraqi elections of October 2002 - in 
which Saddam Hussein got a 100 percent 
endorsement, and thus overdid the best Stalinist 
results of 99.95 percent - the campaign song 
played again and again on all the state media was 
Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You."

One outcome of the American invasion is that it 
has generated a much more uncompromising 
"fundamentalist" politico-ideological 
constellation in Iraq. This has led to a 
predominance of the pro-Iranian political forces 
there - the intervention basically delivered Iraq 
to Iranian influence. One can imagine how, if 
President Bush were to be court-martialed by a 
Stalinist judge, he would be instantly condemned 
as an "Iranian agent." The violent outbursts of 
the recent Bush politics are thus not exercises 
in power, but rather exercises in panic.

Recall the old story about the factory worker 
suspected of stealing: every evening, when he was 
leaving work, the wheelbarrow he rolled in front 
of him was carefully inspected, but the guards 
could not find anything, it was always empty. 
Finally, they got the point: what the worker was 
stealing were the wheelbarrows themselves.

  This is the trick being attempted by those who 
claim today, "But the world is nonetheless better 
off without Saddam!" They forget to factor into 
the account the effects of the very military 
intervention against him. Yes, the world is 
better without Saddam Hussein - but is it better 
if we include into the overall picture the 
ideological and political effects of this very 
occupation?

The United States as a global policeman - why 
not? The post-cold-war situation effectively 
called for some global power to fill the void. 
The problem resides elsewhere: recall the common 
perception of the United States as a new Roman 
Empire. The problem with today's America is not 
that it is a new global empire, but that it is 
not one. That is, while pretending to be an 
empire, it continues to act like a nation-state, 
ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if 
the guiding vision of recent American politics is 
a weird reversal of the well-known motto of the 
ecologists - act globally, think locally.

After 9/11, the United States was given the 
opportunity to realize what kind of world it was 
part of. It might have used the opportunity - but 
it did not, instead opting to reassert its 
traditional ideological commitments: out with the 
responsibility and guilt with respect to the 
impoverished third world - we are the victims now!

Apropos of the Hague tribunal, the British writer 
Timothy Garton Ash pathetically claimed: "No 
Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, Amin or Pol Pot, 
should ever again feel themselves protected from 
the reach of international law by the palace 
gates of sovereignty." One should simply take 
note of what is missing in this series of names 
which, apart from the standard couple of Hitler 
and Mussolini, contains three third world 
dictators: where is at least one name from the 
major powers who might sleep a bit uneasily?

  Or, closer to the standard list of the bad guys, 
why was there little talk of delivering Saddam 
Hussein or, say, Manuel Noriega to The Hague? Why 
was the only trial against Mr. Noriega for drug 
trafficking, rather than for his murderous abuses 
as a dictator? Was it because he would have 
disclosed his past ties with the C.I.A.?

In a similar way, Saddam Hussein's regime was an 
abominable authoritarian state, guilty of many 
crimes, mostly toward its own people. However, 
one should note the strange but key fact that, 
when the United States representatives and the 
Iraqi prosecutors were enumerating his evil 
deeds, they systematically omitted what was 
undoubtedly his greatest crime in terms of human 
suffering and of violating international justice: 
his invasion of Iran. Why? Because the United 
States and the majority of foreign states were 
actively helping Iraq in this aggression.

And now the United States is continuing, through 
other means, this greatest crime of Saddam 
Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the 
Iranian government. This is the price you have to 
pay when the struggle against the enemies is the 
struggle against the evil ghosts in your own 
closet: you don't even control yourself.

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the 
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the 
author, most recently, of "The Parallax View."