[and quite enjoyable]
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/opinion/05zizek.html
The New York Times
January 5, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
London
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 dont 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 regimes 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 Houstons 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 todays 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 Husseins 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 dont even control yourself.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for
the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of The Parallax View.