Author: Martin Kramer

The Saddam Papers

On By Martin Kramer

Saddam soon will be history. It’s important that the United States collect and preserve as much of it as possible. I refer to the vast archives of the various arms of the Iraqi regime: the presidency of the republic, the Baath Party, the Republican Guard, the intelligence and security organizations, the ministries of foreign affairs and information, and more. If the United States establishes a military authority to run the country, it should do what the Western allies did in occupied Germany: collect and collate the archives of the enemy. That’s necessary not only to locate any weapons of mass destruction, and to de-Baathize and de-Saddamize the state. It’s the only way to provide researchers with the evidence they will need to reconstruct precisely what went wrong in Saddam’s Iraq.

The process is already underway. In 1992 and 1993, two Kurdish groups turned over to the United States eighteen tons (four million pages) of Iraqi documents seized from abandoned government offices in the north. This massive collection has been digitized and used to great effect by the Defense Department and Human Rights Watch. The Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard has a significant portion of these documents in digital form, as well as other documents left behind by the Iraqis in Kuwait. (Kanan Makiya directs the project.) The documents themselves are stored by the National Archives.

But this is a pittance compared to the massive archives in Iraq itself. Documents from every military unit, government office, scientific lab, overseas embassy, secret prison, and interrogation cell, make their way in a steady stream to Baghdad. There they are passed up the bureacratic chain of command, in multiple copies, to the most trusted inner circles. In the protocols of the meetings held around Saddam’s long table, decisions of war, repression, and evasion are carefully recorded for further action. These are the real “smoking guns.” As Human Rights Watch put it in 1994 (in regard to the Kurds), “it is not unlikely that the strongest evidence of genocide will only be found in the event of a change of government in Baghdad and the opening up of security archives there.” That’s probably true for a whole range of highly sensitive subjects, from elimination of dissidents to support for terrorism.

When an army moves, its priorities are operational. That’s why it’s so important to emphasize, in advance, the need to avoid the destruction of enemy documents, and to secure them as rapidly as possible. Not only do the documents have immense long-term value. They are certain to back up the rationales for the war itself. Captured enemy documents can have a dramatic political impact. To this day, the Osama bin Laden video recovered in Afghanistan, in which he boasts of bringing down the World Trade Center, is the strongest public piece of evidence against him. Last spring, the Israeli Defense Forces seized a trove of documents from Arafat’s compound, Palestinian political offices, and police stations. The documents linked Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to terrorism, and their publication put Arafat beyond the pale in Washington. If the United States goes to war on only half a tank of international legitimacy, expeditious publication of Iraqi documents will be even more important.

It’s not just the Iraqis and Americans who have an interest in these archives. Kuwaitis might like to know more about Saddam’s decision to invade their country in 1990, and the fate of Kuwaitis who “disappeared” during the Iraqi occupation. Iranians might like to know about Saddam’s still earlier decision to invade their country in 1980, and Iraq’s strategic rationale during the war. And Israelis would wish to learn what Saddam was thinking when he sent missiles into Tel Aviv in 1991. His connections with Arafat and Palestinian groups will also be of prime interest. An international commission of historians could supervise that aspect of the work.

Personally, I’d like to see the documents from the foreign and information ministries. I want to read the evidence of the Baghdad regime’s cynical use of the soft-headed scholars and the gullible journalists, the do-gooders and the fellow travellers, the Ramsey Clarks and the John Pilgers. Send in the xerox machines.

Saidiana

On By Martin Kramer

Here is interesting news about Edward Said, Columbia University’s celebrity professor of English literature, Palestine, Islam, and what-have-you. Said has a long-standing connection to King’s College, Cambridge. He has the status of a member, and has been an occasional visitor there, most recently this past fall. The College is a redoubt of the left. Its provost, Patrick Bateson, signed a letter to The Guardian last April, calling for an academic moratorium on contacts with Israel. That unleashed a tidal wave of publicity and criticism that shook the Provost’s Lodge and the College.

So it was particularly unwise for Edward Said’s friends to choose this moment to nominate their hero for an honorary fellowship of the College. The inner deliberations of the College congregation are not public, but The Guardian picked up enough gossip to make a story. Details are murky, but the bottom line is that two fellows who had criticized Bateson also spoke persuasively against Said’s nomination, and apparently succeeded in nixing it.

It’s not often that Edward Said gets turned down for honors these days, and I find it refreshing. No one has done more than Said to confuse scholarship and advocacy, and it frankly looks pathetic when his partisans rush to his defense by declaiming his scholarly virtues. Edward Said is a package deal. At King’s College there are people who rightly understood that honoring Said would be interpreted as honoring his politics. I don’t know exactly how it happened, or what the arguments were, but King’s College has kept its honor.

Of course, in America it’s another story. Berkeley is about to enjoy a visit by Said, hosted by its (federally-funded) Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and paid for in part by the Chancellor’s fund. The Daily Californian carries a strange quote from the vice-chair of the Center: “We’re inviting him in his capacity as a university professor. Edward Said is an important advocate of Palestinians but also a professor of English.” You would think that Said had been invited to lecture on Austen or Conrad. But I doubt there will be much literature in a lecture with this title: “The U.S., the Islamic World and the Question of Palestine.” My prediction: the lecture’s only relationship to English will be that it is delivered in English. You can judge for yourself from the webcast, which is supposed to become available on February 20.

By the way, note this sentence in the report of The Daily Californian: “Born in Jerusalem in 1948, Said’s family was forced to settle in Cairo, Egypt after the establishment of Israel.” First, there is the grammar. Perhaps if Berkeley’s English department actually taught English, instead of The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance, this wouldn’t happen. Second, Said was born in 1935. Third and last, his parents were already settled in Cairo even before his birth, and Said has written a whole memoir of his Cairo childhood. The news item is more evidence of how people continue to assume that Said is a 1948 refugee. No amount of counter-evidence, or even Said’s own account, has made any difference. People believe what they need to believe, and I imagine that if Edward Said did not exist, the denizens of Columbia and Berkeley would have invented him. Perhaps they did.

ADDENDUM: I’ve been informed by a reader that The Daily Californian ran a correction. It admitted that its original article “erroneously stated that Said was born in 1948. Actually, he was exiled from Jerusalem in 1948.” Wrong again. Said went on an extended family visit to Jerusalem in 1947, and left it near the end of that year, returning home to Cairo. The crucial point of Said’s memoir is that as a boy, he didn’t feel the loss of Palestine, and that at home, the subject was “repressed, undiscussed, or even unremarked on.” The refugees, he wrote, were regarded as “those Others.” (Read the first part of Chapter VI.) His Palestinian awareness and activism flowered only later, in the 1960s. Said has given an accurate representation of himself. He’s acknowledged that his personal sense of exile (from more than one place) is a matter of sensibility, not a fact with a date. It’s others who keep stretching his biographic envelope, because they need him to be a perfect icon of dispossession. That need apparently extends to The Daily Californian, which cannot get it right in two tries.

ADDENDUM+: The administrators at Aston University, in Birmingham, England, have intervened to cancel a live video-link with Edward Said, organized by a student anti-war group. The reason: it might disturb public order. This is all too reminiscent of the mindset that almost kept Daniel Pipes off the York University campus in Toronto. Aston has an absolute obligation to rescind the ban and let the show go on.

Bir Zeit-on-Hudson

On By Martin Kramer

Two weekends ago, Columbia University hosted a Palestinian film festival. I have nothing against such festivals, which have been held over the past year in Seattle and Chicago. Some of the films are worthy examples of the art. But of course, Columbia’s faculty can be counted upon to give a legitimate exercise the flavor of a hate-fest. This time, it was the turn of Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the department that sponsored the festival. According to the Columbia Daily Spectator, Massad, speaking on a festival panel, praised the films as “weapons” and “likened Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s cultural views to those of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.”

All this is standard procedure for Massad, who throws out Nazi analogies with reckless abandon. (When the Campus Watch website named him, presumably for doing just that sort of thing, he called it “a Gestapo file.”) This week, Massad has cropped up on the pages of Al-Ahram Weekly, and he has outdone himself. The article is a rant against the anti-Israel left in Europe (e.g., Derrida, Bourdieu), for not being anti-Israel enough. Alas, too many of the left’s culture heroes only demand an end to Israeli occupation. They fail to see that Israel itself, in any borders, is a racist entity. The Jews, not being a nation by (Massad’s) definition, cannot have nationalism. They have only racism, implemented through colonialism. In this one op-ed, Massad manages to repeat the words “racist” and “racism” twenty-two times. Talk about Goebbels.

So here are the highlights. Israel is “a racist Jewish state,” the “offspring” of “the foundational racism of Zionism.” The “European Jew is a colonizer who has used racist colonial violence for the last century against the Palestinian people.” Israel was founded “by armed colonial settlers.” “Zionist Jewish colonialism” was a “commitment to European white supremacy in Jewish guise.” “Jewish colonists were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939.” There has been an “ideological and practical collusion between Zionism and anti-Semitism since the inception of the movement.” Zionism “has always been predicated on anti-Semitism and on an alliance between Zionists and anti-Semitic imperialists.” Zionism itself had an “anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora.”

Heard enough? Too bad. “Israeli colonialism and racism operate with the same force, albeit with different means, inside the Jewish state as they do in the territories Israel occupies.” Israel’s racism manifests itself in “the racist curricula of Israeli Jewish schools, the racist Israeli Jewish media representations of Palestinians, the racist declarations of Israeli Jewish leaders on the right and on the left, and the Jewish supremacist rights and privileges guiding Zionism and Israeli state laws and policies.” “The ultimate achievement of Israel,” concludes Massad, is “the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew.”

On any blind reading, you would discount these as the blurtings of a rabid fanatic, obviously consumed by a hatred of Israel and its people so venomous and manic that it has destroyed any capacity for sober historical judgment. You would be right.

Yet Massad, in the dens he inhabits, is not considered a fanatic at all. Quite the contrary: he is the flower of Columbia University and American Middle Eastern studies. He completed his doctorate at Columbia; Columbia University Press published it; and Columbia University now employs him (to teach, inter alia, Israeli politics and society). The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) awarded him its prize for outstanding dissertation, and the resulting book has been reviewed favorably by MESA’s current president-elect. Massad also recently passed his three-year review at Columbia, and is now on leave writing what I have heard described as his “tenure book,” the opus he hopes will make Columbia his oyster. It’s entitled The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, and its core argument is—you guessed it—Israel is a racist state.

It will be fascinating to see how Rashid Khalidi, the new Edward Said Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia, and designated head of its Middle East Institute, deals with the Massad phenomenon. (Khalidi earlier endorsed Massad’s first book as “one of the best of the new crop.”) And I eagerly look forward to Massad’s “tenure book”—or, to borrow from his own stock of analogies, his Mein Kampf.

POSTSCRIPT: I noticed that Khalidi’s endorsement of Massad’s only book describes it as “well-written.” So here’s a sample, from chapter one:

Whereas the genetic moment of every national interpellation secures the subsequent claims made by popular nationalism anchoring the political and popular concept of the nation, every retelling of the story of the nation becomes in fact a moment of sublation (incorporation and transcendence), wherein the newly constituted Jordanian identity sublates its predecessor in an interminable process, and whereby the new Jordanian identity is reinscribed as the one that had always already existed as it does today.

Also don’t miss Massad’s recent exchange with Israeli “new historian” Benny Morris, in which Morris turns the tables and shows “surprise” at Massad’s racism. “I resent your accusation of racism,” Massad huffed—and immediately retaliated by calling Morris a “racist Orientalist.” Is there a pattern here?

UPDATE: One of the things I did learn from Orientalism was that the most effective way to damn someone is to quote him. Said, in his walk through the valley of orientalist texts, left no quote unturned. I recently deployed this technique in dealing with Columbia’s Joseph Massad, who wrote an anti-Israel article in the Ahram Weekly full of self-incriminating hyperbole. All I had to do was quote him.

Now Massad has replied, also in the Ahram Weekly, in an article loaded with sweeping assertions. According to Massad, I am “keen to defend Israel’s prerogative to kill and bomb anyone who stands in its way.” I seek to “extend Israeli violence to the U.S. academic arena.” I have “not yet eliminated anyone physically,” but I and my “young dupes” have the “express aim of imploding freedom.” I am guilty of “virulent anti-Arab racism.” And so on.

What disappoints me about this rambling text of 2,300 words is that Massad does not quote me even once. Of course, nowhere have I written that Israel has the “prerogative to kill and bomb anyone,” but surely I must have written something worth quoting, even out of context, which would damn me. Massad, alas, has failed to master the ingenious technique of Orientalism, despite reading and rereading it. (He’s also failed to learn from Said that you lie low until you have tenure, but that’s another matter.)

It’s just another reminder that the unique and irreplacable Edward Said will have no successors. The Beirut Daily Star once likened one of Said’s Beirut lectures to “an American rock concert for the learned and the not-so.” An apt comparison—and when Said is gone, we’ll be left with the Edward impersonators.