Edward Wadie Said: Ten Years After

Edward Said (November 1 1935 to September 25 2003).

Those were dark days. 

Iraq’s armies had taken Kuwait on August 2 1990 under the assumption that the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had somehow given Saddam Hussein the “green light.” Saddam was angry at Kuwait and the Gulf Arab states for refusing to bail out his country, which had fought a war — largely on their behalf — against Iran over eight years. The futility of that war and the destruction of Iraq’s economy, as well as Saddam’s irrational view that the invasion of Kuwait would somehow assist his cause, led to a standoff.

The Carter Doctrine of 1979, which authorized the US to defend the Arabian Peninsula from attack — they assumed it would be by Iran — was enforced. US troops began to sail and fly toward an enfeebled Iraq. War was on the horizon.

It was to be a new kind of war, premised on the example of the 1989 US invasion of Panama and buoyed by the near collapse of the Soviet Union. George Bush’s New World Order was on the horizon. It seemed like full spectrum domination of the world by the United States and its allies.

Edward Said, the eminent literary critic and writer on world affairs, author of “Orientalism” (1978), was to speak at the University of Chicago. An up and coming historian, Rashid Khalidi, had invited him, and we graduate students were thrilled. Said was going to put forward the view that we shared: La li-al-harb, la li-al-dictatoriyat (no to war, no to dictatorship), as they say in the Arab world.

He arrived with his wonderful smile on his face, chatted with us and asked about the kind of reception he would get. The police were in full force. The chapel was packed. Said went up to the stage to lay down the line: Saddam was a dictator. He was a brutal ruler. He had betrayed Arab nationalism. Of that there was no doubt. But the US was not to be seen as a moral force. It had drawn its sword across the neck of Arab freedom, and its bombing raid would do nothing to engender the self-determination that the Arab masses desired.

Said’s fierce defense of the rights of the people in the region as a prelude to his assault on imperialism impressed me. Later, Said would write that this position — against Saddam, against war — “was the only honorable and serious position to take.”

Edward Said died ten years ago. He died in September, after former US President George W. Bush decided to shun the world’s protests and the advice of many sage elites and to send his legions into Iraq. Bush’s father had bombed the country into submission, but he had decided to use his airpower to subdue Saddam rather than to overthrow him with ground forces.

From 1991 to 2003, Iraq was under a brutal sanctions regime. Toward the end of that regime, Said wrote, “Iraq’s defenseless people were offered nothing but punishment, punishment so sadistic that Dennis Halliday, the UN administrator of the oil for food program, could not tolerate it, and therefore resigned. To read the April 30 UNICEF report on the effects of the sanctions, a detailed chronicle of malnutrition, rising illiteracy, poverty, socioeconomic breakdown and collapse of medical facilities, is to come face to face with US criminality.”

An earlier UNICEF report noted that half a million Iraqi children had died due to the US ordered sanctions regime. When then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked what she thought of the half million children dead — “more children than died in Hiroshima,” said 60 Minutes journalist Leslie Stahl — Albright replied, “It think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

It is this that Said must have had in mind when he spoke of “US criminality.” It was on top of this silent war — with the occasional missiles fired by the US into Saddam’s Iraq — that George W. Bush decided to go in and finish the job.

The weight of Edward Said’s consistent position — no to war, no to dictatorship — meant that he opposed Bush’s 2003 thrust, and when it occurred, Said reported in precise detail the devastation that it had already begun to create. Iraq was going to be destroyed, Said warned, so that Bush’s America could capture the “desert place ‘out there’ destined for the exercise of US power unleashed illegally as a way of cowing the entire world in its Captain Ahab like quest for re-shaping reality and imparting democracy to everyone.”

Matters went downhill after Said died. When Mongol ruler Hülegü’s armies destroyed Baghdad in the 13th century, they had to move their camp away from the wind to escape the smell of death. The Americans set up their encampment in the center of the city, their Green Zone, holding fort as the country crumbled under the machinery of US warfare — aerial bombardment, torture, the use of sectarian militias, the encouragement of divisive politicians.

Over the past few months, thousands of Iraqis have continued to die, sacrificed to George W. Bush’s Captain Ahab like quest. Said did not live to see it, but he had already forecast what would come.

Iraq was not Edward Said’s main area of inquiry. He was a cultural critic, who wrote beautifully about Joseph Conrad and music. He was a literary critic, who wrote about beginnings and contexts. But above all, Edward Said was a Palestinian writer who wrote with feeling and precision about the great injustice done to his people.

His greatest book, “Orientalism,” was written not simply to deliver a judgment about the cultural discourse of colonialism, but to “rub culture’s nose in the mud of politics.” It was the first part of a trilogy to settle accounts with a long tradition, since the 18th century, of crafting a view of the “Orient” as inferior and lesser than Europe, preparing and elaborating a tradition of thought as the spear for colonial domination.

After that first book made clear the relationship between discourse and power, the other two would make sense — “The Question of Palestine” (1979) and “Covering Islam” (1981). Palestine’s politics were so over-determined by an Orientalist view of the region that it was impossible to make the claim for the self-determination of the Palestinians. It was not enough to recite the injustice; one had to show how the very way in which the region was thought had put the Palestinians under a shroud.

The third book was on the ways in which a powerful Western media configured Islam as the answer to all questions about North Africa, West Asia and South Asia. The idea of “Islam” covered over all other meaningful dynamics in the region — such as economic exploitation and political oppression. The Iranian revolution could not be seen as the culmination of a country’s search for freedom; it had to be seen as the eruption of Islamic rage.

“Orientalism” opened the conceptual space for Said to write about Palestinians — which he would do in several books — and about Islam and nationalism. The book inaugurated a field of study — post-colonial studies — but what it did not set in motion as a field was the kind of work that Said was now able to do more than ever as a political essayist for Palestinian freedom.

According to Said’s FBI file, in May 1982 an agent wrote to FBI director William Webster pointing out that Said’s name “had come to the attention of the [New York FBI Office] in the context of a terrorist matter.”

A note pointed out that the FBI should be in touch with the State Department’s Middle East section. Soon after, the FBI added a photo of Said addressing the December 1980 Palestine Human Rights Campaign’s National Conference, as well as a 1982 news clipping that attempted to connect Said and his wife Mariam to the PLO in the context of a full-page advertisement in the New York Times that informed the US public as to Israel’s depredations in Lebanon.

Said did not know the details of this file, which had been brought to the public’s attention by David Price in 2006, three years after his death. He would have chuckled at the way the FBI developed its fear of a “terrorist matter” from a human rights speech and from a New York Times advertisement. It would have been too much to ask if they had somehow linked him to Islam — his family’s deep roots in Levantine Christianity notwithstanding (wonderfully reconstructed in a book by Said’s sister, Jean Said Makdisi, “Mother, Teta and Me,” 2004).

Adherence to the rights of the Palestinians could only be seen as akin to terrorism by an imagination damaged by Orientalism and confounded by nationalism in the Arab lands. Such was the fate of the FBI and other allied US agencies. They could not see Said for what he was — a patriot for a nation that has been suppressed.

But Said was not a blind patriot. He would often generate an honest critique of that national movement when it betrays its principles and its people. Not long after the ill-starred Oslo Accords in 1993, Said wrote of the “fashion-show vulgarities” of deceased PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, held together by the overwhelmingly noxious figure of former US President Bill Clinton, on the White House lawn. The 1991 Gulf War had shattered the certainties of the region, and forced an exhausted Arafat to sign what Said called “an instrument of surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.”

At the time, Said was attacked for his warning. Two decades later, he stands utterly vindicated. A few pages after Said’s piece in the London Review of Books, the Israeli scholar Avi Shlaim wrote that Oslo opened the door to peace. “From today’s perspective, 20 years on,” Shlaim admitted in The Guardian, “it is clear that Said was right in his analysis and I was wrong.”

Edward Said has finished his lecture. He has attacked Saddam Hussein and argued against the US war. Before he even began to speak, people lined up to attack him. The police fanned out to prevent any disturbance. The questions came fast and furiously. A number of them attacked Said for anti-Semitism and for anti-Americanism, and for his defense of Palestinian hopes despite all the odds.

He stood there, elegantly dressed, unflappable, the smile never leaving his face. One after the other, patiently and acidly, Said demolished the questions. When we went up for the reception, I asked him how he managed to keep his cool.

“This is nothing,” he said. “You should see the fireworks in the Palestinian National Council.”

Vijay Prashad is the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.