But why Iraq, of all the places on earth?
For two reasons. Some people within the Bush administration felt that Iraq was unfinished business since 1991. That, at the end of the Gulf War the United States should have toppled Saddam Hussein, but Bush, Senior’s advisers had said don’t do it—and, as we now know, for good reason. Bush, Junior. and his advisers wanted to complete what that administration hadn’t done, and what Clinton hadn’t done, even though Clinton had gone a long way in punishing Iraq, with his US ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, defending the deaths of five hundred thousand children as a result of these sanctions.
How many children died?
Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes asked Madeleine Albright, is the death of more than half a million children as a result of these sanctions justified? And Albright replied, yes, “we think the price is worth it.” Now when you have leaders with this mentality trying to teach lessons on morality to the rest of the world, it doesn’t quite wash.
You said there were other reasons for picking Iraq.
Another reason for targeting Iraq after 9/11 was that the Israelis didn’t like the existence of Iraq as an independent state, with an independent army. Even though Iraq didn’t have nuclear weapons, the Israelis felt it was always possible that this army would be used against them in the future, failing to see that the reason for Arab hostility to Israel is linked to their failure to do what they should have done regarding the Palestinians. So there was a lot of pressure from the Israelis as well, and I think that pressure played a much more important part than it should have in impelling the Bush administration to take Iraq.
The Pentagon would also have known that as they knew that the Iraqi army was quite diminished, that Iraq barely had any armaments left to wage a real struggle, that the Iraqi air force had been destroyed. Iraq was already a defeated country, defeated by sanctions, wrecked by the years of US bombings in the “no-fly zones” in the northern parts of the country.
So we were looking for a weakling?
A weakling to demonstrate American power. And, you know, a number of US spokesmen, in their arrogance at the time, said, we did it because we could.
Could you talk about the doctrine of preemptive war?
The doctrine of preemptive war is totally against the UN Charter. The UN Charter was meant to guard nations against so-called preemptive wars. The only condition for waging a war is if there is real evidence that you’re about to be attacked. And the reason that was written into the UN Charter is because the biggest defender of preemptive wars was Adolph Hitler. Every time he invaded a nation, whether it was Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Austria, he would say, our interests are under threat. Or in the case of Czechoslovakia, the minority German population in the Sudetenland is under threat from the majority Czechs. Or in Poland, they threatened our security. We want Danzig back. Why should we have a Polish corridor? All these things were perfected, which is why the UN Charter was written to prevent that. And Wolfowitz, Cheney,—
And Perle—
—Perle, all these guys, with the journalists supporting them, and egging them on. Christopher Hitchens, Kanan Makiya, and the House Arabs, as I’ve referred to them. Trained to bark loyally when the United States goes to war, “you will be welcomed, you will be greeted with sweets and flowers, yes, come and liberate, liberate us, liberate us.” All these people were braying away. And so, Bush made the jump, and the result is what we see. More than a million Iraqis have died since the occupation of that country by the United States. It’s no good saying, “But we haven’t killed all of them,” as some are prone to do. You may not have killed all of them, but you created the conditions in which they could be killed by occupying that country.
And Afghanistan now?
Afghanistan now is a total and complete mess. Everyone knows it. President Obama knows it. His advisers know it.
Is the United States in another Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan?
I think the only way it could become a Vietnam is if they sent in at least a quarter of a million more troops. I think then they would be in a quagmire. There would be heavy US causalities. They would kill a lot of people. They would wreck that country. The war would spill over into Pakistan, involve large segments of the Pakistani population and military on both sides, and there would be hell to pay. Afghanistan is a mess because the government the United States put in is a totally corrupt government, which is feathering its own nest, stealing massive amounts of money from the foreign aid coming in, not doing anything for the people.
Then, on top of corruption, there are too many civilian causalities, too many deaths. You become dependant on air power, as in Vietnam. And the drones come and bomb villages, they bomb innocents, and that is creating a situation that is unwinnable. The British couldn’t defeat the Afghanis, the Russians couldn’t, and the United States is not going to defeat them either, unless they wipe out half the population and occupy that country permanently with half a million US troops, which I think won’t wash. The region wouldn’t bear it, and the US population would have something to say.
You know, it’s a mystery to me why Obama didn’t use his election victory to say we’re going to end that mess. We’ve got to pull out. Some of his advisers know that situation better than anyone else. So an exit strategy to get the United States and NATO out of Afghanistan is needed before the situation gets only worse.
What about women’s rights in Afghanistan?
It was shameful when Cherie Blair and Laura Bush went on television to justify the Afghan intervention by saying it’s a war to liberate women. I pointed out at the time that, if this was the case, it would be the first time in history that an imperial power had waged war to liberate women. It wasn’t going to happen, and it didn’t happen. The condition of women is as bad as ever, and these are reports from women’s groups in Afghanistan.
So what would you do?
I don’t think anything can be done from the outside. I think in order to change these conditions, change has to come from the inside. There was a very interesting development when pro-Taliban groups in Pakistan publicly flogged a poor woman. Pakistani television showed a video of the flogging, and there were protests in large cities in Pakistan. Women’s groups denounced it. The chief justice summoned the attorney general to a court and said our laws are being violated, what on earth are you doing about this? Then the Taliban retreated, and said it wasn’t us, we didn’t do it. So people in Pakistan are now saying, no, these are not “outside values.” It was never the case that we liked anyone being flogged. Public floggings and all that is something that started in Pakistan during the Zia-ul-Haq military dictatorship. We never had it before, and you’re now doing it to women. That’s not part of our law, either.
And Sharia law?
This is a Wahabi version of Sharia law, which is not accepted by many Shias or an overwhelming majority of Sunni legal scholars. It is a sectarian Wahabi interpretation. And why has this now suddenly landed in Pakistan? Why should women suffer? I mean, you know, women under control of these wretched Wahabists suffer more than Muslim women did in the medieval period in Islam. And that is something they don’t even realize. And honor killings, which are going on in different parts of the world. I mean, I know that it’s not exclusively Islam. We had honor killings in South America, But the point I’m trying to make is that in a world without any positive values, in a world totally obsessed with money and celebrity culture and all this, people are becoming slightly crazy.
Do you think that’s new?
It’s not new, but in the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s, people did think the world could be changed for the better. And when that feeling goes away, then all these retrogressive groups and movements come to the fore.
Could you talk about the use of torture in Guantánamo, elsewhere?
Well, the fact that torture has become acceptable again is all part of the war on terror logic. It’s right to torture because we have to torture them to get information
from them, they’re going to attack us. This is an old, old argument which goes back to the medieval era, to the Inquisition. That’s where we are now. And if you can’t torture them in the United States proper, torture them in Guantánamo. If you can’t torture them in Guantánamo, torture them at the Bagram base and prison in Afghanistan, where the Russians used to torture people. The United States and its allies are torturing people in exactly the same place. And there are horrific stories coming out of there. Or use the Pakistani torture system, or the Egyptian, or the Syrian. Send in our people to soften up a guy until he tells the truth, never asking how do you know it’s the truth? This guy was waterboarded, god knows how many times, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I mean, what value does his testimony have in any court of law after that? You’re basically destroying anything you might have got from a serious interrogation of these people. So these are the values. You know, after the 9/11 attacks, Bush and Blair used to say, we will never let these people change our way of life. But you have.
Chapter 6
The Revenge of History
Oliver Stone: You write in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, “There is a universal truth that pundit and politician need to acknowledge: slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters. Time and time again, in the upheavals that have marked the world since the days of the Roman Empire, a given combination of events has yielded a totally unexpected eruption. Why should it be any different in the twenty-first century?”
Tariq Ali: It won’t be any different, of that I am pretty sure. We can’t predict what these events will be or where they will happen, but they will surprise the world. It’s precisely because one knows what has happened in history before that one maintains a certain degree of optimism. The Latin American developments were not foreseen by anyone. No one expected that Venezuela, a country that was barely known in the world, would suddenly become part of the “axis of hope,” as I call it. Chávez put Venezuela on the world map. You know, the first time Chávez went to the Middle East, Al Jazeera interviewed him for one hour. Because Arab viewers hate subtitles, a very good actor read all his lines in Arabic. Chávez is anyway quite magnetic, but afterwards, the Al Jazeera producer who did this said to me, we had thousands and thousands of emails, more than we’d ever had. And 90 percent of these emails said, in one form or the other, when will the Arab world produce a Chávez?
Where could the next Chávez come from?
Well, it is difficult to predict exactly, but I think that South Asia and the Far East might throw some surprises at us, which we’re not ready for. We talk about China as an economic giant but we very rarely talk about what the effects of this system are in China. Peasant uprisings, working-class factory occupations, a restless, turbulent intelligentsia, all these things could happen.
And is there a potential wild card in an internal economic collapse of the empire? Some people have suggested we cannot afford all these troops, all these bases.
Well, I think a lot will depend on the economy. A lot will depend on what the American public will do if the economy continues to go down like this. If the American population comes out and rebels against all this, well, that’s the end for the empire. It can’t continue.
It’s very hard for the population to rebel against the military. That is always difficult historically.
Yes, but people might vote for someone who says, we’ve done too much abroad for too long, and the costs have been great for us, and now let’s use that same energy to transform the shape of our country at home. If a politician were to say that at the present time, I think such a person would get a lot of support. Obama had possibilities, but it’s obvious he’s not going to go down that route. He might if there was a big popular movement in the United States demanding that. There isn’t. But I think that is what is needed.
Another potential wild card that I would suggest is in the offing would be some large environmental crisis. That would shake everybody up fast.
Well, without any doubt. I mean, once that becomes obvious to most people. But, again, how do you then reorganize the world?
At that point it becomes necessary—
—essentially to work together, to plan, to have a planned economy.
There would be a plan right away?
There would be.
Would people be pulling out their Marxist textbooks on how to do it? Are there specifics?
Well, I don’t think there are any good textbooks to show how good planning can work, but at least we now know how not to do it. And we know that the plan needs to involve the population as a whole, which needs to offer some oversight from below.
What is the best planned state in the world? Is it Switzerland?
I think it probably is one of the smaller Scandinavian ones. The Norwegians are quite well planned. The Cubans are well planned in terms of their social infrastructure. They’ve done it, and they’ve shown how it could be done.
But this would be perhaps the biggest surprise of all because people do keep saying, yes, it’s going to happen, but they don’t expect it to happen tomorrow.
No, and because so many people like living in the present—and are encouraged to live in the present—they don’t want to think about tomorrow. They live for today.
You write that it’s as if history has become subversive. The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it’s best to forget it and start anew. But as everyone is discovering, you can’t do this to history. It refuses to go away. If you try to suppress it, it reemerges in a horrific fashion.
Precisely.
Do the particular origins of the US Empire make it in any way different, more prone to ignore or deny history?
When I think about the origins of the American Empire, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is that the colonists began by destroying the native population they encountered, and this was linked to a religious fundamentalist belief in their own goodness and greatness. I mean, the fundamentalists who came here, the pilgrim fathers, had a way of thinking that wasn’t basically different from that of the Wahabis or Osama bin Laden. In fact, there are lots of similarities between Protestant fundamentalism and Wahabi fundamentalism, and you see that in how they treat women, all the campaigns.
The Salem Witch Trials?
Exactly. You know, women are possessed by the devil. Beat it out of them. So that was the origin. Then you have slavery, the basis for much of the wealth generated inside the United States. Then you have the violent expansion of the empire, which is something Cormac McCarthy describes very well in one of his finest novels, Blood Meridian. Then you have the Civil War, which we are told is about the liberation of slaves, and which is partially to do with that, but which is essentially an attempt to unify the United States by force. So all this created the modern United States as we know it. And from the First World War onward the United States grew in size and influence, and became a dominant power, which after the Cold War has become an ultra-imperialism, unchallenged, unchallengeable militarily, very strong, without rivals. This is the first time in human history that an empire has been without any rivals. The Romans sometimes used to think that they were, but that’s because they weren’t totally aware of the strength of the Persians or even the Chinese. They thought in terms of the Mediterranean world, not globally. So, this is the first time that this has happened. And it made the leaders of this empire extremely complacent, who took the consent of their people for granted.
But what happens if this consent is suddenly withdrawn? Now the big problems confronting the empire at the moment are economic, the state of the economy at home, and military overstretch. Iraq is a disastrous war. Afghanistan is turning out to be the same thing. The empire’s “backyard,” as it has traditionally been known since the time of the Monroe Doctrine, is totally out of control, with a wave of radical politicians, the Bolivarian politicians, led by Hugo Chávez, backed by Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa, and the Cubans, and Bishop Lugo of Paraguay, and backed less strongly but also with the support o
f Lula in Brazil and Bachelet in Chile and Kirchner in Argentina, saying to the United States, we’re not going to let you isolate us any longer. We’re going to collaborate with each other. We won’t let you use a single country to destroy another, as we’ve done in the past. And the leaders of the United States are now being compelled to look at this new face of Latin America.
Now it’s a long way to go from here to say that this is going to break up the United States. I think people who talk about the automatic breakup of empires are wrong. It doesn’t happen automatically. But the economic crisis, if it carries on like this, if the billions given to save the banks fail, then I think you could have unpleasant surprises in store for the rulers. They may not be surprises that people on the left particularly like, but they will be surprises. There will be a new mood, which asks, why are we spending so much abroad? Why should we bolster up these regimes and countries? What has it got to do with us? Let’s improve our own country. And how such a movement develops remains to be seen. But I think one thing we have to say is that the triumphalism and euphoria that existed after the collapse of the Soviet Union has virtually gone. Everyone knows that it’s a more difficult world that they have to confront.
It’s not “the end of history”?
Far from the end of history, and far from simply being “the clash of civilizations.” I mean, I think even Francis Fukuyama has acknowledged that the world has changed beyond what he’d imagined, and Samuel Huntington, in his last public work, moved beyond the clash of civilizations to warning of a clash within Christianity, saying that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in the United States faced a real challenge from the Hispanics, who he said are threatening our way of life. These are sort of Catholic Christians from South America who are threatening our way of life. He was wrong in that sense, but he was indirectly right in that the size of the Hispanic population in the United States is now larger than it’s ever been. Their growth rates as a population in terms of demography are much, much higher than that of the non-Catholic sections of the population. And the new migrants from South America act as a bridge with South America. They’re concerned about what happens in Chiapas in Mexico. They’re concerned about Central America. They’re concerned about the Bolivarians, concerned in a good way in many cases. And the young generation of Cubans in Florida don’t want the United States to attack Cuba. So things are not the same as when Florida and other places were just nests of reaction, with old counterrevolutionaries coming to find a nice home. It’s moved a lot beyond that. The interesting question, which in my more utopian moods I sometimes ponder, is whether the changes in South America might travel across this bridge via the Hispanic populations in the United States to produce something that none of us can foresee. Certainly the hegemony of the English language is being challenged in many American towns in the south.
On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation Page 8
