I, too am a Said fan, but agree with Yoshie's points. In particular I think he tends to dehistoricise 'Orientalism' so that it becomes one long underdifferentiated story. More recently he has been very critical of the move away from materialist analysis.
I guess the point is that a lot of people were wrong-footed by the Bosnian war. The left was more obviously confused by the experience of the involution of the Eastern bloc. The East's embrace of the market felt like too many to be a 'betrayal', and the resentiment against the East, always implicit in EuroCommunism, welled up into active hostility in the early nineties. The left in particular was perversely preoccupied with a mythical revival of 'Nationalism' in the East (when, in truth, nationalism was at its lowest ebb).
Furthermore, humanitarian intervention was relatively untested at that time. A left that had tended to see state action as the exemplar of political action was confused by the profession of humanitarian motives into thinking this was some kind of overseas welfare operation. In fact it was them more than anyone else that invested the whole exercise with a spuriously progressive motivation.
Others who were as wrong-footed as Said included the New Left Review (who ended up having a big split over the issue) and, if my memory serves me right, Tony Benn was pretty equivocal over here. The largest Trotskyist party here, the SWP was also equivocal on the whole thing, though they made a big song and dance over Kosovo.
The real difference though is a bit sadder. The differentiation that happened in Britain over the more recent Balkan war was that those who were optimistic about Blairism were for the war, whereas those who had been left behind by the whole process were hostile to it. That is why, for example, many Tories were against the war, and why the left split between die-hard Old Labourites and Trotskyists on the one hand and New Labour humanitarians on the other. This time more people were concentrated on the anti-side, but in terms of their social influence, it was negligible.
In message <v03130301b42f7b3594e4@[140.254.113.106]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>Hi Steve:
>>I'm surprised to find Said's name on this list, since he ended up writing
>>some fine anti-NATO pieces during the bombing of Yugoslavian, Albanian,
>>and Chinese civilians a few months back. Any explanation?
>
>I don't remember if Said published any explanation for taking the stand he
>took at that point (maybe Doug or Jim Heartfield or someone else
>remembers). Though I admire Said's work in many respects (both his
>scholarship & activism), I think that his culturalist framework of
>political analysis -- Orientalism -- didn't serve him well in this case, in
>that it may have inclined him to believe (contrary to facts) that 'a poor
>nation of Muslims has been unfairly denied military aid from outside due to
>their (real or imagined) religion' or something like that. I recall
>liberal hawks played up this line: 'a fear of the specter of political
>Islam within Europe made the West ignore the plight of Bosnian Muslims,'
>laying the ground for support for increased interventions, leading to the
>bombings and beyond, by first of all manufacturing the non-existent guilt
>of 'appeasement.'
>
>Yoshie
>
>
-- Jim heartfield