Ed Husain: The Islamist

“The Islamist”, in which Muham(Ed) Husain describes his journey from one form of over-simplification to another, is a story worth both telling and publishing. It works as a local story, of one Bengali-Indian-Briton growing up in Muslim Tower Hamlets in the 1990s and becoming obsessively involved in Wahabi-tinted London Muslim politics. Other east end Muslims might have become involved in business of some form or other, or rap music, or gangs, but Husain’s story provides a detailed look at one of Britain’s tiny subcultures, amateurish and naïve Islamism, and this is interesting. I can even vaguely identify with the earnest silliness of the whole thing, having spent cold mornings as a teenager selling the Socialist Worker newspaper to uninterested nurses and marketmen. And I wholeheartedly admire Husain’s rejection, by the end of the book, as he visits Syria and Saudi Arabia, of Islamism’s scriptural literalism and state-obsession in favour of more traditional and Sufistic forms of Islam.

A great local story, which fails when it makes grandiose claims to universalism. At such moments (perhaps it was the Penguin editors imposing sexiness) the style descends to tabloid: “Lurking in the background were forces preparing to seize the minds of Britain’s Muslim children,” Husain screams, and it may have looked like that to a young man who kept his company and came from his sheltered background of limited cultural interaction. But there were hundreds of thousands of ‘Britain’s Muslim children’ whose minds were occupied by other things. I would suggest that there were plenty who grew up with a lot more knowledge about the politics of various Muslim countries than Ed Husain, and who were therefore not so gullible when (and if) they met a Hizb ut-Tahrir loon.

In penance for his previous Islamism, Husain overcompensates. And, just as he’d done as an Islamist, he oversimplifies. All Islamic organisations other than Sufi groups (not only in London but abroad) are described as Islamist, and all are therefore Wahabi-oriented, intolerant, potentially violent. All of them are what Husain thinks he used to be when he was an Islamist. But understanding Ed Husain and his psychic projections does not help us to understand organisations ranging from the Taliban to Turkey’s ruling party, via Hizbullah and Rashid Ghanoushi’s Tunisian opposition, all of which have different definitions of ‘Islam’, different motivations and goals. Ed Husain is really not that important.

Once Husain’s absurd Islamist reasons for hating America, Israel, and the rest of it, have been exploded, he is unable to see any other reason why people might be angry with America or Israel. The only cause of anti-Zionist anger, as he sees it, is anti-Semitic Islamism. This will be news to the Jews, Christians and atheists, and the non-Islamist, non-Jew-hating Muslims, who oppose the Zionist state and its crimes. But Husain is unable to hear these voices, despite his stay in Syria, because he’s reading the Middle East from his bitter Tower Hamlets perspective. The Middle East here is important only as part of the psycho-drama.

Almost all of his criticisms of the Saudis, in particular, are entirely accurate. And he manages to write, “Neither is there an excuse for state terrorism: the governments of Britain, the US and Israel are as guilty as any 9/11 hijacker.” Yet he doesn’t write about US-corporate control of governments and markets in the Middle East, or about the US role in projecting Wahabism worldwide, first as a weapon against the Soviet Union, and then (and now) against Iran. He doesn’t at any point explain genuine Muslim grievances such as American military bases and control of economies, the long destruction and now occupation of Iraq, the Palestinian tragedy caused by the establishment of a Jewish state. (Why is Husain not as outraged by the Jewish state as he rightly is by the inexistent ‘Islamic state’? Zionism and Islamism are, after all, two very similar examples of religions, under great and traumatic change, coming unhinged from spiritual tradition and attaching to statist politics instead).

Discounting the historical experience of various Muslim populations, discounting political context entirely, results in a failure to understand these people’s ideas. Husain is amazed when educated Syrians express support for attacks on Israeli civilians, even though “these were not Hamas or Hizbullah supporters, just ordinary Syrians expressing a commonly held viewpoint.” He concludes that this is a result of the ever-expanding phenomenon of ‘Islamism,’ against all the evidence. Arabs of Christian and Muslim background have been engaged in war with Zionism for many decades, since long before Islamism emerged. Their opinions are not directly tied to Ed Husain’s Tower Hamlets experience.

The combination of wide-eyed naivety and racist over-simplification is unpleasantly apparent in the following passage, describing the London bus and tube bombs on the morning of the G8 summit:

“The summit, thanks largely to the combined efforts of Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof, had been set to tackle poverty in Africa. Now it was forced to address Islamist terrorism; Arab grievances had hijacked the agenda again. The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of no relevance to a committed Islamist....Who in the Arab world cares that some 6000 people die each day in Africa from AIDS. Let them die, they’re not Muslims, would be the unspoken line of argument.”

Here is analysis as biting as a BBC royal correspondent’s. Husain now inhabits a nice world ruled wisely by nice people. Tony and Sir Bob were about to abolish African poverty, when baddies ruined the plan. And then he talks rubbish. In reporting of the London bombs and at the summit, Arab grievances weren’t even raised, let alone allowed to hijack the agenda. Surely it would have been a good thing if Palestine and American imperialism had been forced onto the summit agenda, but in reality there was familiar shoulder-to-shoulder and civilisation-versus-barbarism grandstanding, and silence on the tragedy in Iraq. Finally Husain slips unconcernedly between ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamist,’ ending with the slander that no Arab cares about AIDS in Africa.

It’s a great shame that the quote from The Times on the front cover says “A complete eye-opener.”

At another point Husain jumps from a discussion of Wahabi intolerance to the “racist Arab psyche,” even the “racist reality of the Arab psyche.” Although it’s undoubtedly true that Saudis and other Arabs can be guilty of savage racial, sectarian and class prejudices, I dislike this generalising and essentialising language to describe hundreds of millions of people. I too have been appalled by Arab behaviour, particularly in Saudi Arabia, but the Arabs I live with and mix with socially oppose racism and sectarianism. There are plenty of Saudis, too, who are appalled with their own government and religious authorities. Discriminating Arabs (a lot of Arabs) will talk about ‘neo-con racism’ or ‘Zionist racism,’ but avoid expressions like ‘crusaders’ and ‘Jewish racism.’ Ed Husain, remember, is now too civilised and grown-up to use expressions like “racist Jewish psyche.”

But it looks like I didn’t like the book. I did, except for the slanderous and overly silly bits. I wish Ed Husain success not only in learning more about the big world out there, but also in the continuation of his authentic path towards God and the Prophet.

Palestines

Here is my response to recent events in occupied Palestine. It’s quite long .. but not nearly as long as the Palestinian tragedy.

Fatah was established as a revolutionary liberation movement, the party of the Palestinian masses wherever they were, the movement which energised the Palestine Liberation Organisation and took it out of the hands of the Arab regimes. Arafat, Abu Jihad and other leaders resisted and negotiated, and withstood even the 1982 seige of Beirut, until the rulers of the world were obliged to recognise the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO included various small Marxist factions, but its centre was Fatah. The word means ‘opening’ or ‘victory’, and is a back-to-front acronym of harakeh at-tahrir al-watani al-filastini, or the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.

The PLO and Fatah were nearly synonymous, and were everywhere under attack. In 1970 organised Palestinian resistance was driven out of Jordan. In 1982 it was driven out of Lebanon, and out of the eastern Arab world entirely, to exile in Tunisia. The leadership was separated from those living under occupation and from the refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and of course from the Palestinian minority inside Israel, but still the PLO, and Fatah, remained the hope and the rallying point of all Palestinians. The first Intifada came from the occupied grassroots, but Palestinians looked to the PLO, and Arafat’s Fatah, to translate the Intifada’s victories into political and diplomatic gains.

Then came the disastrous Oslo agreements and the farce of the ‘peace process,’ all process and no product, and clearly never aimed at peace but at Palestinian surrender (in Arabic, not ‘salaam’ but ‘istislaam’). The supposed basis of the process was a two-state solution, and ‘land for peace’ based on UN Resolution 242. That is, Israel deigns to give 22% of Palestine back to its people, in return for which these people would stop threatening the nuclear-armed Jewish state with their catapults. In reality, the Oslo deal meant that the now-threatening PLO would be superceded by a Palestinian Authority, a bureaucracy for bits of the West Bank and Gaza which would police the restive natives on Israel’s behalf but which would have no real sovereignty. Arafat was not nearly as good at politics as he was at symbolism. The best PLO leaders had been assassinated, and the fat class around Arafat was hungry. Mistaking the machinery of a semi-state for their national rights, and desperate, many Palestinians on the inside reluctantly supported Oslo. The Palestinians on the outside, half of the Palestinian nation, were no longer represented.

Settlement building on land belonging to the virtual Palestinian state didn’t stop for one day during the Oslo ‘peace process’ years. Nor did assassinations or mass arrests. Intensified closures and checkpoints meant that from the start of Oslo to the outbreak of the second Intifada the Palestinian economy halved its size. Meanwhile, international ‘aid’ money was channelled to the Fatah-staffed Palestinian Authority, and corruption blossomed. Fatah had become like any other Arab regime (or just, any other regime). It perceived its function to be crowd control and the protection of the rulers’ property. Hamas, which had originally been encouraged by Israel as a counterweight to Fatah, now began to take on the role of a genuine liberation movement, free of corruption and of any illusions concerning the bantustan state.

At Camp David Clinton and Barak failed to intimidate Arafat into signing an agreement which would describe a series of beseiged cantons on less than 22% of Palestine as a state. Sharon’s stroll through the Aqsa compound was only the catalyst for the second Intifada. For the first weeks the rebellion involved stone-throwing and slogan-chanting youths. Scores were murdered every day by occupation forces while the American media wondered why Palestinian mothers didn’t care to stop their children dying. Then, unsurprisingly, the Intifada was militarised. In fighting and in providing food, healthcare and education to the beseiged Palestinians Hamas proved itself to be far more organised and committed than Fatah.

The Intifada was effectively defeated by overwhelming military force, destruction of remaining infrastructure, including farmland, Western political support for the occupation, the timorous silence of Arab puppet regimes, and international indifference as the media focus shifted first to New York, then to Afghanistan and Iraq. Arafat retrieved some of his earlier charisma by his final refusal to capitulate and the subsequent Israeli refusal to allow him out of his compound in Ramallah. After his suspicious death elections were held for a new president. The most popular and capable Fatah leader was Marwan Barghouti, who intended to stand from his Israeli prison cell. But Israel and the US made it clear that they would only talk to Mahmoud Abbas, so Fatah fell in line and pressured Barghouti not to stand. There was no Hamas candidate. The Palestinians duly voted for Abbas, who dropped all pretensions to resistance. He waited in vain for Israel to enter into serious negotiations. Israel did withdraw its few settlers from the heart of Gaza, and presented this to the world as a liberation of the strip. In fact the siege of Gaza, from land, sea, and air, only tightened, and military attacks on the civilian population increased in frequency and ferocity.

Unlike Kuwait, or for that matter Israel, Palestine had to continually prove to the ‘international community’ that it was grown up enough to deserve the basic rights guaranteed by international law. It had to prove this by holding more elections (though not, of course, elections which all Palestinians could participate in). So parliamentary elctions were held in January 2006. Hamas surprised everybody, including itself, by taking 74 out of 132 seats.

Having demanded democracy, America and Israel, with the European Union limping behind, now set about punishing the Palestinians for voting the wrong way. It’s worth very briefly examining the claimed reasons for isolating the democratic choice of the occupied Palestinians, and their hypocrisy.

Firstly, Hamas doesn’t recognise Israel. True, Hamas believes that Arafat made a strategic blunder by officially recognising Israel before Israel allowed the Palestinians minimal rights. In this Hamas is only being logical. Hamas certainly knows that Israel exists, and even if Hamas drank enough whisky to forget Israel’s existence (which isn’t likely) Israel would still be there, with its Merkava tanks, its checkpoints and its nuclear bombs. In any case, Israel doesn’t recognise Palestine. Its failure to recognise Palestine has immediate and practical ramifications, like the occupation and the ethnic cleansing.

Secondly, Hamas doesn’t recognise the two-state solution. But again, neither does Israel. And Israel is the occupier. By obeying UN resolutions, without the need for any negotiation, Israel could vacate the land for the Palestinian state. And Hamas has repeatedly stated that an Israeli withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967 would result in a long-term ‘hudna’ or ceasefire, and that the conflict would then become cultural. This position is very similar to the IRA position when it was welcomed into the Northern Irish peace process: the IRA kept its dream of a future unified Ireland, but agreed to renounce violence and to work politically with its former enemies on the ground.

Thirdly, Hamas has attacked civilians. This is surely the most hypocritical of ‘reasons’ for isolating the movement. Since September 2000, Palestinians have killed 1023 Israelis, about 700 of whom have been civilians (many of these were armed settlers). In the same period, Israelis have killed 4160 Palestinians (not including those who died as an indirect result of the occupation, for instance critically ill people who died in ambulances held up for hours at checkpoints). The Palestinians do not have an army, but counting armed men as legitimate military targets, at least 2819 of the dead have been unarmed civilians. 118 Israeli children have been killed. 943 Palestinian children have been killed. The numbers alone show that Israel is far more guilty of killing civilians. And I would say that the violence of the occupied struggling to liberate themselves is more justifiable than the oppressive violence of the occupier, but the empire disagrees. It gives Israel financial, military and political support, and demonises Hamas. Clearly, the ‘killing civilians’ argument is just propaganda. Either that, or Palestinians are not considered to be real human beings, so culling them is not like killing real people. Or both.

Even if we could establish that the Palestinian side has been more violent than the Israeli side – which we can’t – Hamas, unlike Israel, has shown itself capable of sustaining ceasefires. And anyway, many of the Israeli victims have been killed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is linked to Fatah.

Fourthly, Hamas aims to establish an Islamic state. True, in theory. But it hasn’t tried to impose ‘Islamic’ codes of behaviour on those who don’t want to practise them. It knows that it was elected for its resistance agenda and its freedom from corruption, not for Islamic reasons. It is in fact a bulwark against the more offensive Salafi nihilist groups which are now appearing among Palestinians in their desperation, the groups who have firebombed liquor shops and who hold the BBC journalist hostage. And Saudi Arabia is America’s greatest Arab ally despite being a ferocious fundamentalist state. And of course Israel is not a state for its citizens, still less for the people under its control, but a Jewish state.

So after the elections, the seige. Or rather, the international seige added to the Israeli seige. Palestine’s economy has been deliberately and systematically destroyed, so it is completely dependent on money from outside. This stopped coming in. Even money granted by Iran and others couldn’t come in because no bank would dare to transfer it to the Palestinians and thus be put on America’s list of terror-funding organisations. Israel withheld tax monies which it had collected from the Palestinians themselves. Salaries were not paid. For the first time in all the years of horror, malnutrition became widespread.

When Hamas was first elected it offered Fatah a place in a unity government but Fatah, on American and Israeli orders, refused. In fact, the dominant Abbas-Dahlan faction actively lobbied for the seige of Palestine. America’s ‘Abrams plan’ channelled arms from America and Israel via Jordan and Egypt to Fatah militias, and encouraged chaos by blocking every move towards Palestinian reconciliation. For good measure Israel arrested 40 Hamas MPs, including ministers, with not a squeak from the democracy-loving West. Following early bursts of civil war in Gaza, the Mecca agreement set up a unity government. Once again Abbas and Dahlan followed orders, and undermined the agreement. The independent Interior Minister resigned when Fatah refused to accept his formation of a security force. Gaza descended into chaos.

In the end Hamas responded to the endless provocations by taking over Gaza. It may have won despite itself. It certainly wasn’t difficult for the much better organised and motivated cadres to rout a divided and corrupt Fatah, however much international backing it had. Capturing the Preventative Security building, where the Authority had tortured Hamas men on Israel’s behalf, must have been a sweet victory. But it’s clear that the present situation is no victory for anyone except, in the very short term, Israel.

I’ve laid the blame for the fighting at Fatah’s door, but more generally all Palestinian forces are guilty, and the gangland culture that has grown in the territories. This last isn’t the Palestinians’ ‘fault.’ If national struggles are indefinitely extended, the struggling population is brutalised. Look at Iraq. Or Algeria. Or Chechnya. Many young militiamen in Palestine were children when the second Intifada began. They grew up seeing their fathers, brothers and schoolmates being shot or beaten or dragged away to imprisonment. They heard sonic booms and the whine of missiles instead of the icecream van. Many Arabs are describing the fighting as ‘madness,’ and I think it is, literally. The battles are being fought by pople suffering psychological trauma. A further aspect is the closed, overcrowded nature of the Gaza Strip, the largest prison on earth, the refugee camp of longest duration. If you crowd too many mice into a cage, they start to eat each other.

The probable future can be read from the Abbas and world response: political Palestine split between Fatahland on the West Bank and Hamastan in Gaza. Now that Abbas has appointed an unelected government under a prime minister whose list won a staggering two per cent of votes in the elections, America, Israel, Europe and the Arabs have reestablished contacts and financial aid. The West Bank will be rewarded, but not of course with a realistic political solution. And Gaza, once again, will be educated. Another lesson, or the same lesson, will be drummed out.

But the Palestinians will not be educated out of resistance. If Hamas falls, it will be replaced in Gaza by al-Qa’ida types who will be disastrous for Israel as well as for the Palestinians. Abbas can buy people off for a while, but he has no real credibility, and the West Bank will not accept separation from Gaza.

Fatah is no longer one organisation but a collection of factions, warlords and interests. If Abbas continues to slander Hamas while they seek negotiation, they should appeal to Barghouti and to the honest grassroots under the Fatah umbrella. There is no other option for the two movements than reconciliation.

Meanwhile, commentators cry that the two-state solution is off the agenda. But it already was. The West Bank Palestinians are irreversibly divided into enclaves, bounded by Jews-only roads, with limited access to water and agricultural land. The Jordan valley is off limits to them. The wall cuts deep into their territory. The real choice is between apartheid – the current reality – and the one state solution. All the rest is theatre.

But to get to the one state, the Palestinians need an articulate voice. It’s time for a new PLO to unify and represent all Palestinians, secular and Islamist, from the 48 lands and the 67 lands, and from the diaspora. The Arab client regimes, Europe and America are against them. It is a huge task, but it is more necessary than ever before.

And all of us should support them. Palestine is at the epicentre of world conflict. A just solution to the Palestine problem is necessary for all of us, including Israeli Jews.

Gonu

The first I heard of it was the Monday evening when a friend called to say that his son’s birthday party had been postponed due to the hurricane warning. Hurricane warning? Five minutes later my brother-in-law called about it too. You’ll forgive me for not taking it too seriously. For a start, we’re not in a hurricane zone. There has never before been a cyclone (as Indian Ocean hurricanes are called) in the Arabian Sea. There have been a few tropical storms, but they fail to make headway into the dry and dusty Gulf. Secondly, Oman had cried wolf a month previously when an Indian holy man predicted a storm and a tidal wave which would destroy the Qurm area. He said disaster would strike on a Wednesday, and a hysteria - which made the expatriate population chuckle - rapidly spread, so that children were kept home from school and more than a few workers failed to go to work. Nothing happened, of course. Except that the Indian holy man was imprisoned for starting the panic.

But there it was on the Omani TV station. Warnings to stock up on drinking water and then to stay indoors. Anyone within two kilometres of the sea should find a safe place further inland. On Tuesday morning I saw satellite images of Cyclone Gonu on the internet. It was huge, a swirl spreading its arms between the Iranian and Omani coastlines, with a defined eye. It had been upgraded to a category five cyclone. That’s as strong as a cyclone can get. Hurricane Katrina was a category five. A category five makes trees, rocks and cars dance in the heavens. A category five knocks down buildings. I bought a lot of candles and water, and taped up the windows. When I’d taped the windows, I shielded them with wardrobes and upended beds.

Cloud built up over Tuesday, with spits of rain and gusts of wind. On Tuesday evening the weather forecast said the storm was moving towards southern Iran, away from us, and weakening. Now it didn’t seem such a terrifying prospect it became exciting, a break from the high-forties, sun-blasted routine of an Omani summer. Shortly after midnight I went walking. Remarkably for June I didn’t sweat. Lightning flashed to the south and east, over the sea. A steady rain started.

Torrential rain woke me at four. Now the internet said Gonu had changed course again, and was coming directly at Muscat. Sur was being badly battered. When red light dawned we let the children run about outside in the rain, before it got worse and we’d have to keep them in the house. The storm intensified throughout the day. Before noon the wadi must have overbrimmed because the floods came. It always floods when it rains here, the earth being baked and unabsorbent, the city on an edge between rock mountains and the sea, but this time the floods stretched as far as we could see. Water poured through the windows in two rooms, soaking carpets and furniture, making us work with mop and mesaaha. Water started dripping though the ceiling, and here I went up to our Lebanese neighbour whose balcony was flooded. He couldn’t open the door to it so we unscrewed a window frame and got out that way to break the blocked drain pipe with a hammer and bail out with buckets. From up there I saw the building was an island, and many of our neighbours were submerged to the second storey.

In the end Gonu was a category one cyclone, and its centre had veered out to sea, sparing us a direct hit. It just brushed us with its fingertips, a whirling dervish of a storm absorbed in the centre around which it turned. I’ve seen worse rain in Britain, or Pakistan. The wind was never more than strong.

On Thursday morning we went for a drive to inspect the damage, which was astounding. The roundabout near our house had been partly carried away, partly drowned in mud. Roads were missing chunks. Trees and telephone poles were down. Cars were smashed and turned on their backs. A river rushed down the carriageway towards the coast. The closer to the sea, the more savage the effects, and particularly on the poor. Labourers’ houses had collapsed. Hundreds sat in the streets trying to dry out.

Our electricity came back the morning after the storm but at our friends’ house in north al-Hail it remained off. We were sweating without air conditioning so went to sit on the roof, and military helicopters circled loud overhead. It all felt a little like Baghdad. Just one day of it. Without the explosions or the fear of your neighbour.

The water was off. Supply pipes had been broken by the storm, plus sewage had been mixed up with it. The army and others came round to hand out drinking water and water to fill the bath with, for washing and flushing the toilet.

On Sunday I drove my brother-in-law, who’d wisely come to stay with us, back to his flat in al-Ghubra. It was much worse than anything we’d seen. Cars piled on top of each other three or four deep, mud and felled trees and wires, rubble and gaping holes in the roads, not in locations we’d have to point out to each other, but everywhere. The death toll for Oman then stood at 50, a modest day’s bodycount for Baghdad. The final toll must be far higher.

The crisis reinforced basic characteristics of the country. The poor – the Indians – suffered most. The rich least of all. That’s normal: remember New Orleans after Katrina. What isn’t normal is that there was a genuine sense of brotherhood in extremis. Neighbours looked after each other. Everyone kept calm. Everyone smiled. That’s the abnormality of Oman, this gentle, safe country, one of the last refuges of a traditional community-based Islam.

Any lessons? I don’t know much about the climate, but it seems very likely that this first-ever Arabian Sea cyclone, like the droughts in Australia and the United States, like the more severe hurricanes in the Caribbean, was caused by global warming. It seems likely, therefore, that it will happen again. The ramifications for Oman will be dramatic. A good step would be an Omani reacquaintance with the natural environment. Wadis will reclaim their paths. Building roads and houses in the wadis regardless won’t work. And unsustainable beachfront projects like The Wave (see my posting called Unsustainable Development) must be suddenly looking .. unsustainable. Which could be a good thing.

Much of Sur and Quryat are still underwater, a week on. The water by now, especially in these temperatures, is filthy. And Qurm, I almost forgot. There was a mini tidal wave, and the business district was trashed. On a Wednesday, as predicted. Has the Indian holy man been released from prison? He just got his timing a bit skewed, after all.

Blaming Syria .. Fisk and Others

Up to seventy people have been killed so far in Lebanon’s most violent internal battle since the end of the civil war. On one side are the Wahhabi militants of Fateh al-Islam, Palestinians, Lebanese, Saudis and others, based in Tripoli’s Palestinian camp of Nahr el-Bared. On the other is the Lebanese army, with the support of most Lebanese and Palestinians.

Very sadly, very ominously, Wahhabi nihilists are expanding their reach. In recent weeks there have been al-Qa’ida linked bomb attacks in Morocco and Algeria, and hundreds of arrests in Saudi Arabia when a plot to attack infrastructure was allegedly uncovered. In Iraq, Wahhabi car bombings and beheadings continue, with Sunnis now as likely to be the victims as Shia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan al-Qa’ida increases its power. The nihilists are sometimes confused with genuine resistance against occupation (in Afghanistan and Iraq) or against dictatorship (in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia), but in fact their presence confuses and weakens resistance.

There are many reasons for the growing al-Qa’ida phenomenon, some of which I have discussed previously. They include past and present American, Saudi and Pakistani promotion of Wahhabi groups to trouble the Soviet Union, revolutionary Iran and Arab nationalism, and the collapse of traditional patterns of social belonging and religious observance in large parts of the Muslim world, and the poverty of education in many Muslim countries, and the brutalisation caused by both dictatorship and occupation. Then ample funding from private donors in the Gulf as well as Wahhabism’s long term supporters (see above) married to nihilistic ruthlessness can make a small group of fighters extremely effective. In Nahr el-Bared there are an estimated couple of hundred fighters, but it will be almost impossible for the Lebanese army to arrest or kill them without a politically impossible and bloody invasion of the camp.

What is not in doubt is that the nihilist phenomenon is widespread, complex and dangerous. As usual, however, some people are resorting to simplistic, propagandist explanations. In the case of the Nahr el-Bared battle, Lebanese government officials and large sections of the media are blaming the Syrian regime, without providing any proof. It’s true that Fatah al-Islam’s parent organisation was Syrian sponsored, a creation of the divisions among the Lebanese-based Palestinians following the expulsion of PLO forces by Israel in 1982, but Fateh al-Islam broke away from the parent organisation a long time ago. There is far more evidence that Fateh al-Islam is being helped by Syria’s enemies. Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, published in the New Yorker, suggested that Saad al-Hariri, among others in the wealthy Lebanese Sunni establishment, is helping to channel American funds to Wahhabi groups to counter the influence of Shia Hizbullah.

Robert Fisk in the Independent writes “it is difficult not to feel Syria’s hand these days.” His evidence for Syrian involvement in Nahr el-Bared? The Syrian border is “scarcely ten miles away.” Which brings me to my problems with Fisk. There is no question that he has been the best-connected, best-informed and bravest of British Middle East correspondents, and that he has often been fearless in calling a spade a spade when it comes to Israeli crimes. Most Western journalists in the region can’t even speak Arabic, so we should be grateful for Fisk. He’s been better than the rest, but latterly, still not good enough. During last summer’s onslaught on Lebanon he kept reminding his readers that Hizbullah’s border incursion and hostage-taking had ‘provoked’ the Israeli attack, without mentioning the more than 10, 000 border violations by Israel in the previous six years, or the Lebanese hostages. He didn’t change his tune even when Olmert announced that Israel had prepared the attack months in advance, months before the supposed provocation.

Fisk once wrote very convincingly of how Western journalists may become biased in the Middle East, before politics and money come into play, for simple cultural reasons. Anglo-Saxons, he said, will naturally feel more at home with Israeli friends who eat the same kind of food, watch the same kind of TV shows, and so on, than with Palestinians in their mosques and camps. French journalists will naturally sympathise with Lebanese Maronites, who speak French, listen to French music, and worship in Catholic churches. And now it seems that something similar has happened to Fisk, who was so personally moved when his friend Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated. (There is a good case to be made for Syrian guilt in the Hariri assassination, but there are other arguments too, and Fisk has not aired them.) Fisk has become uncritically supportive of the Lebanese Sunni and Druze establishment and its perspectives. In the stand-off between the government and opposition, it is clear where he stands. Stooping low, he tells us again and again how “intelligent” war-criminal Waleed Junblatt is, and, worse, how “glorious” Junblatt’s wife.

I put it down to exhaustion, and perhaps to fame. The poor man has seen more than his share of blood, from the Iran-Iraq war to Sabra and Shatila. He’s been shot at on numerous occasions and beaten up by Afghan refugees from Anglo-American bombing. He’s written at least one excellent book (“Pity the Nation” on the Lebanese war – I haven’t read his latest) and it is time for him to have a dignified rest. But not to rest on his laurels. Too much of his newspaper journalism now looks like a blog: his moral and emotional responses to events are as important as the events themselves. He uses the phrase “of course” in nearly every paragraph. He goes on about his old dad and his mother Peggy. He consistently refers to Blair as “Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara” – which is vaguely funny, but suited to satire rather than reportage. I have become tired of reading articles which I know will give me Fisk’s opinion rather than fresh information, which will degenerate into ‘why, o why?’ and ‘if they’d only asked me.’

Back to Syria. There are plenty of good reasons to condemn the Syrian dictatorship, such as its staggering capacity for corruption and its abuses of human rights. The recent imprisonment of intellectuals like Anwar Bunni and Michel Kilo simply for expressing their opinions will have horrified all true friends of the country. For all I know (because I’m no expert on intelligence matters) Syrian officials may be playing a stupid and dirty game in Nahr el-Bared. But there is no evidence for it, not yet, and there are better explanations. People who illogically blame Syria for absolutely everything that goes wrong in the region, providing no proof whatsoever, lose their credibility. In Iraq’s al-Anbar, the Sunni resistance has now realised that its first enemy is al-Qa’ida style Wahhabism. It would be nice if the so-called Sunni leadership in Lebanon could do the same, in this case at least, and stop playing anti-Syrian politics.

Racaille

Segolene Royal has been much criticised for warning that the French ‘banlieu’ will riot if Sarkozy, the interior minister who called banlieu inhabitants ‘racaille’ (‘scum’), is elected president. The banlieu is prone to riot anyway. Why?

Well, here are a few personal anecdotes. The stories are 15 years old, so are not directly relevant to Sarkozy, but explain something of the racist background to France’s social problems.

One: I was walking one evening in Paris with an upper-middle class English friend, whose mother is Malaysian. I’m an English Arab, but white-skinned and blue-eyed. Out of nowhere arrived two policemen. With no warning they grabbed my friend, threw him against a wall, pushed a truncheon against his throat until he was choking and weeping. They took me round the corner and asked why I was walking with him.

Two: I had a French girlfriend of Algerian origin, also white and not noticeably Arab, who was being harassed by an insane neighbour. She was scared, so we went to the police station to inform them of the situation. The police were polite and concerned. They wrote everything down. But when they asked my girlfriend’s name, their tone changed radically. They scrumpled up the report sheet, told us no offence had been committed, and advised us to get out immediately.

That girlfriend remembered her old maths teacher ordering her to the back of the classroom with the rest of the Arabs and Africans because, as the teacher explained, “I’m employed by the French state to teach French children.”

Her father had escaped from the extreme poverty of his (French-occupied) Algerian childhood to France, where he spent a lifetime as a migrant labourer, suffering casual and brutal violence from foremen and police – and then inflicting some himself, in his impotence, on his own family. When they finally settled in an industrial town, he found work in a factory where he would train white teenagers to do his dangerous, lowest-of-the-low job, and then watch them promoted after a couple of months to brighter and better things.

In Paris I had an African friend who for a time lived in a slum building with other African families. One day a skinhead threw a teargas canister into the corridor where children were playing. The police weren’t interested. They clearly had more important things to do with their time. The same friend was stopped almost every day by police on his way to work, insulted, and ordered to show his papers.

These scorned and abused French citizens, the blacks and beurs who work in the worst jobs for the lowest pay, who live in the ‘rabbit cages’ of the urban wasteland, who have the least representation, whose voices are not heard, are supposedly the omnipotent Islamic fiends who threaten to destroy French secularism, the whole French way of life, and whose clothing choices must therefore, for the sake of freedom, be sanctioned by the state. (To his credit, Sarkozy did not support the ban on hijab in schools.)

The fact that the French were still using torture and prison camps for civilians in Algeria in the 60s in an attempt to hold on to their empire, and that an ex-Vichy police chief (Maurice Papon) at the same time dealt with demonstrating pro-independence Algerians in Paris by tieing their feet and throwing them into the Seine, suggests that France has got savage racial prejudice to blame, primarily, for its social problems. The bodies-in-the-Seine incident happened in October 1961. At least 200 civilians were murdered, a crime in which the French media collaborated by its silence and concealment.

It’s certainly the case that many young French Arabs and Africans are somewhat raggamuffin, but extreme alienation and marginalisation tends to have that result. Besides, if white men in France have a couple of years off the rails they are not in danger of being shot by the police. When I was there, beurs and blacks were shot in the back every couple of months. This was considered normal. It certainly didn’t result in soul-searching by the white population.

It is the complex of racism and class oppression which has made the French innercities unbearable. The real 'racaille' are those who blame the victims.

See this link for information on the 1961 massacre:

http://w02-0209.web.dircon.net/Flame/algerians.htm

My absence .. and Sectarianism

Just to remind my readers that I’m here, I’m posting my response to Henry Porter’s Guardian article ‘When Will Islam Damn the Chlorine Bombers?’ The article is at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story
/0,,2062876,00.html

I’m tremendously busy at the moment. I should be able to post properly in a couple of weeks' time. In the meantime, here’s my Commentisfree response:

I agree with Porter's general point that there has not been enough official Muslim condemnation of the Salafi nihilist sectarian killers at work in Iraq. This is because the pro-American order in the Arab world (the Sauds and Hashemites and Mubaraks) has been busy rabble-rousing against Iran and the Shia - hoping to defuse anger against imperialism and its puppets by provoking sectarian and ethnic hatreds. And also because, yes, thre is a serious problem in the Muslim (especially Arab) world of Wahhabi intolerance and literalism, and many people do not realise the extent of the danger. Wahhabism appeals in terms of its anti-Westernism, but of course it has previously been America's greatest Arab ally (against Communism, then against revolutionary Iran) in the region. It causes 'fitna' (dissension) among Muslims, and seeks to erase the riches of Islamic history, philosophy, diversity, and mysticism. Its foot soldiers are deracinated and confused - the products of a brutal Middle Eastern modernism.

However, I must say that there are many unofficial Muslim voices condemning the terrorism. I live in a non-Wahhabi Gulf state, and my family are Syrian. (I have plenty of Lebanese and Iraqi friends). People cheer for the anti-American resistance, but bitterly condemn the 'dogs' and 'agents' responsible for violence against civilians. Syrians in particular fear the wild sectarianism that has established itself in Iraq, and worry that the same could happen in their own diverse and divided society.

Not everybody of course. I've heard Syrian villagers and taxi drivers spout the most obscene sectarian hatred. Ethnic and sectarian divisions are rife in the Middle East, and the chaos unleashed by the destruction of Iraq has been fuel for them.

I also disagree with Porter's comment that Western forces would leave Iraq quicker if there was less bloodshed. This is what they tell the Iraqi and Western publics, but it's obviously not true. Why spend so much money building huge permanent bases inside Iraq? Why provoke the sectarian war in the first place, by many steps, not least Negroponte's Central American style death squads made up of Shia and Kurdish militiamen operating in Sunni areas.

Unsustainable Development

Unsustainable Development

I recently spent a weekend in Oman's ash-Sharqiyya region – the easternmost part of the Arab world – collecting wind-polished rocks in the desert, sleeping on an isolated beach (a turtle crawled up the sand to bury its eggs before dawn), and passing through small coastal villages.

This area remains – for a short time still – unspoilt. Although the inhabitants of the Sharqiyya enjoy the basic amenities which modernisation can and should provide – sanitation, electricity, health services – the state's footprint is soft in the sand. I saw no sign of police. Institutional buildings are few and far between. The corporations have not yet arrived. None of the fast food outlets and coffee factories that homogenise the globe from the tropics to the tundra. So the settlements are handsome. The doors of the simplest houses are carved and patterned wood. Recent building may have been done with breeze blocks, but it's been finished with mud.

The region wobbles on the edge of misnamed 'development.' It would be unwise in this water-scarce area to install flush toilets, but there will be worse. Emirati money is buying up the shoreline. Painted rocks mark the outlines of future residential complexes and hotels. I prayed as I passed that these were markers of dreams that would remain unfulfilled.

We stopped to drink tea in a low-slung village inhabited by shoeless people 'undeveloped' enough to sit in the road, in the shade of the mosque, talking and laughing. Goats nibbled at occasional rubbish. Children squealed. And in the tea house we met … a worker from Kerala state, south India. Even here in this unmonied corner of the Gulf, a member of the imported working class. Down the street a black man crouched, racially African, by culture and language an Arab.

When Oman was new to me I thought that Zanzibari Omanis could be recognised by the colour of their skin. I soon learnt things were more complicated. Many Omanis went to work or trade in east Africa, and many of them intermarried with the people there. At one point Zanzibar was the political capital of Oman, and well before the current bout of globalisation the trade in perfumes, spices, gold and slaves moved capital and people around the Indian Ocean and deep into Oman's mountainous interior. Zanzibari 'Arabs' – usually Swahili-speakers, black, brown and white – claimed Omani nationality in the post-1970 passport age, and helped to build the modern state. Distinct from the Zanzibari community are Arabs of African descent, from every part of Oman, but particularly from the old slave ports of Sur and Salalah.

The Prophet Muhammad did not explicitly ban slavery, but he worked against it by example, freeing slaves and encouraging his followers to seek God's pleasure by doing the same. Notably, the first muezzin in Islam (the man who calls the faithful to prayer), Bilal, was a freed slave. Given this example, it's somewhat shameful that slavery lasted as long as it did in the southern Arabian peninsula (and still exists today in Muslim as well as Christian and animist areas of Sahelian Africa).

Unlike its Euro-American variant, slavery in the Arab world was not associated with rigid racial ideology, and slaves were not so totally dehumanised. Omani slaves were African, but slaves in Syria or Egypt were often brought from the Caucasus or the Balkans. Slaves quickly became assimilated into Arab society. In the peninsula they were adopted by the tribes they worked for. Slaves could marry, do business, buy their own freedom, own property. They were sometimes – like the pre-Islamic Antar – the heroes of epic and romance, and ex-slaves – like the Egyptian Mamluks – even formed their own ruling dynasties. None of that justifies slavery, of course, nor alters the fact that there are some very un-Islamic attitudes to blacks in the Arab world, attitudes which have their roots in the institution of slavery.

In the old days, Gulf Arabs herded animals, dived for pearls, traded frankincense, and often relied on slaves to do menial work. In the oil age, menial work is done by the imported working class, mainly Indians. While the Africans became Arabs, and changed the Arabs, the Indians are sent home at the end of their contracts. One result of oil wealth has been that Oman, by importing workers, has preserved its tribal social system in which all are strong – whatever their skin colour or personal wealth – because all are backed by the solidarity of their tribe. Omanisation, which aims to replace foreign workers with locals, is necessary, and has a better chance of succeeding in Oman than its counterpart programmes in other Gulf states. One result, however, will be to replace tribal equality with a savage internal class system.

Welcome to capitalism, Oman. Eight kilometres of beach front in the capital area which were previously used by locals and foreign workers for picnics, swimming, walks and football have become eight kilometres of private land. A gated community is being built there, the unbuilt houses already sold to rich foreigners – Indians, Arabs, Westerners – and a private road being built from the nearby airport. The mineral spring in the town of Rustaq also seems to have become private property overnight. Public access to the spring is under threat, as are the old houses built over the channeled spring water. There are rumours that a luxury hotel is to be built in their place. A five-star 'Shangri-La' hotel has been built on the previously free-access beach at Jussa. Yitti beach, Muscat's favourite day trip, is slated for further developments – luxury housing and yet another five-star hotel.

The social and environmental disaster that is Dubai crawls closer.

In a region short of water and increasingly long on population, in an economy built on that most dangerous and outdated product, oil, in an Arab world groaning under the weight of American military bases, with Iran staring back at the bases, with depleted uranium wafting down from Iraq-Kuwait, with hatred of foreigners rising, none of this development is in any way sustainable. Part of me wants the collapse to come soon, for the sake of the Sharqiyya and all those regions of the world happily still undeveloped.

Gunboat Diplomacy

On January 11th, US occupation forces took five Iranian officials hostage from a diplomatic office in Arbil, Northern Iraq, prompting protests from the Kurdish regional authorities who had invited the Iranians. On February 4th, an Iraqi army unit under direct American command kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in Baghdad. These are incidents we can be sure of.

On February 14th, the anniversary of the bomb which killed Rafiq Hariri and many passersby in Beirut, eleven Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen died when their bus was bombed by Jundallah, a Sunni fundamentalist and Baluchi separatist group active in southeastern Iran. Iranian authorities accused the US of involvement in the attack, a claim which is backed up by Seymour Hersh and several other analysts who have described American promotion of ethnic and sectarian conflict in Iran, and specifically American cooperation with al-Qa'ida linked anti-Shia groups throughout the region.

Murkier still are rumours that the US administration's Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group is running a campaign to kidnap Revolutionary Guard commanders. Veteran Guardsman Alireza Askari either defected or was kidnapped during a visit to Istanbul in early February, and the fates of several other officers are unknown.

One of Iran's top nuclear scientists, Ardeshir Hussainpur, died on January 18th. His death wasn't announced until a week later, and the cause given then was 'gas poisoning.' The US security company Stratfor has said that the Israeli Mossad assassinated Hussainpur.

Meanwhile, there are now two US aircraft carrier batle groups in the Gulf, and Britain's naval presence has recently been boosted.

This is the context in which 15 British sailors have been arrested by Iranian forces while patrolling the Shatt al-'arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. Immediately much of the Western media fits the event into the narrative of the American embassy hostage crisis. We are told, without a hint of irony, that the British navy is on the Shatt al-'arab to ensure that 'intruders' will be chased off. The British mission, writes Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, is to 'protect Iraq's oil supply' against 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists.' If the Anglo-American invasion and destruction of Iraq is seen against the background of the new oil law hurried through Iraq's absentee parliament, the words 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists' seem apt descriptors of US and British forces. In any case, Western packaging of the story has made very little reference to the recent history of US kidnapping operations against Iranian targets, or to the fact that the Shatt al-'arab was one front in the disastrous Iran-Iraq war during which Saddam Hussain used Western arms and money to cover Iranian cities in poison gas.

Nobody has wondered what the British reaction would be if Iranian forces were found half a mile outside of British territorial waters (this is the British claim; the Iranians say the sailors had crossed the border). The press, 'liberal' and conservative, have remained largely loyal in framing the victim as the aggressor, the aggressor as the victim, once again. Watch this story carefully. It has the potential to escalate into a deliberately-plotted, nation-smashing tragedy. Once again.

America versus America

My children have a Dreamworks animated film called AntZ. I suppose it’s better than the average American children’s film, but still, once you’ve watched 15 minutes you can predict both the conclusion and the moral message that will be rammed violently past your gullet for the next hour and a bit. As in very many Disney films for children or in the Hollywood versions for adults, the message is BE YOURSELF. BE AN INDIVIDUAL. STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD.

It seems contradictory that the country which feeds its children unto obesity with this message is also the country with the most conformist of populations. Americans are more likely than any other people to confuse their national identity with their state machinery, to identify themselves with their leaders and their flag, to believe that their country has a divinely-ordained manifest destiny. The ability of Americans to contemplate alternative perspectives on the world, or even to understand that people in different countries may not want to speak English or eat hamburgers, is severely limited. The declared ideology is individualism, but the reality is rigid conformism.

Parallel to this, the American political system is described as democratic. The assumption even exists that America is in a position to export its vaunted democracy to more benighted lands. In reality, however, the American political system has much more in common with Italian fascism than it does with Athenian democracy. Athenian democracy suggests the rigorous debate of issues by the people in a public space, followed by direct voting. In Mussolini’s model, and in the contemporary US, the people are kept too busy to be able to think, are offered entertainment in place of debate and fantasy instead of facts. Corporations, media and the political parties are all on the same side. In the United States more than in Mussolini’s Italy, much of the religious apparatus is also absorbed into the corporate body. There is no public space. It has all been bought, from the airwaves to the shopping mall which replaces the old town centre.

BE YOURSELF doesn’t mean convert to Islam, or become an anarcho-syndicalist, or opt out of consumerism and live in the forest. There’s a strong media machinery to deal with such possibilities: you don’t want to be a freak, a loser, an evil-doer. GET REAL, buddy! There are prescribed ways to be yourself. You can, for instance, express your individuality by downloading a mass-produced individualised ring tone, or by wearing Ralph Lauren shirts, or Nike shoes, by hanging out with people who read a certain newspaper or drive a certain type of car. You can even prove your anti-establishment credentials by smoking Che Guevara cigarettes.

It’s important to rebel against your parents and the previous generation because by doing so you DEFINE YOURSELF and STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD. Novelty is important. Whatever was done last year is passé. REINVENT YOURSELF constantly. There was even an American TV show about women winning the opportunity to have extensive plastic surgery as well as posture and elocution lessons.

Our economy too requires constant tumult, continual renewal, in order to keep itself out of crisis. Standing still is, for it, disaster. And this points to the truth of American ‘individualism’ – not in fact particularly American, but specifically late capitalist. Marx predicted it. He called it the commodification of the human soul. There are other ways of defining your individuality, which do not rely on brands and products. You could, for instance, examine your position in relation to your family, your nation, human history, to the divine. This is a contemplative exercise which is not helped by the screen screaming BE YOURSELF, or by the late capitalist dissolution of the notion of history itself.

These thoughts have been sparked by Seymour Hersh’s latest article, and by the consequent question, what, and who, is anti-American? Hersh is America’s finest investigative journalist. He broke the My Lai story from Vietnam, and the Abu Ghraib story from Iraq. Now he’s investigating the coming US or Israeli attack on Iran and the proxy wars that the US is already involved in throughout the Middle East.

America is currently fingering Iran for supplying the weaponry that kills US occupying troops in Iraq. This is absurd, and the Americans at the top know it. 95% of American deaths in Iraq have been caused by Baathist or Salafi radicals who despise Iran. These anti-American fighters make or loot their own weapons, or buy them on the open market. They are funded not by Iran but by Saudi Arabia, America’s greatest Arab ally. The American ruling class don’t seem to actually give a damn about the American troops being killed.

Hersh also points to US funding of extreme Salafi groups in Lebanon and elsewhere. There’s nothing new in this. America has backed Wahhabi extremists before, to isolate revolutionary Iran and to trouble the Soviet Union. What makes this time different is that we are in the middle of a series of wars supposedly triggered by an attack on New York on September 11th 2001 … by extreme Salafis. The American ruling class don’t seem to give a damn about the American citizens killed on that historic day.

Last week a bus carrying Revolutionary Guards was blown up in Iranian Baluchistan by a Baluchi separatist (and Sunni fundamentalist) group which is funded by the US. One ‘strategy’ which Hersh describes is the weakening of Iran by arming and encouraging separatist terrorist groups among Iran’s Kurdish, Arab, Baluchi and Azeri minorities. Anyone who still thinks that the US administration is horrified by the civil war and fragmentation of Iraq should think again. They planned for it, and they are planning for it again. The disaster in Iraq has immeasurably strengthened instability and terror worldwide, as well as the global hatred of Americans. The American ruling class don’t seem to give a damn about Americans.

I despise the BE YOURSELF crap that passes for individualism in the US, but I’m not anti-American. Once Americans think beyond the capitalist poison (which is spreading far beyond America’s shores) and media illusion, they can be as bright as anyone else. America has produced Spike Lee and Martin Scorcese, Public Enemy and Miles Davis, John Cheever and Saul Bellow, the Bill of Rights and Malcolm X. America has a lot to be proud of.

What it should be ashamed of, and suspicious of, is its corporate ruling class. The people who whip up the wildest displays of flag-waving patriotism, and who actively collaborate with the enemies of the American people. Who ARE the enemies of the American people.

The Hersh article is here: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070305fa_fact_hersh
On the corporate rape of America, I recommend Naomi Klein’s book “No Logo.”

In Defence of Iran

Many people will have seen the excerpt from an al-Jazeera discussion programme in which Iraqi MP Mish’an al-Jabouri and Iraqi journalist Sadeq Musawi threaten and scream at each other. The occasion is Saddam Hussain’s execution, and the cleavage is sectarian (al-Jabouri is Sunni and Musawi is Shia). Al-Jabouri calls on the audience to read the fatiha for the soul of the ‘martyred president.’ When Musawi objects and points out that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, al-Jabouri says he will do ‘unimaginable things’ to Musawi, and calls him an Iranian, a Persian, and a Persian shoe. After Musawi has walked off, al-Jabouri demonstrates what looks to me like mental illness. He tells us that his own brother and brother-in-law were killed by Saddam, but that he nevertheless considers the martyr president to be the master of Iraq, and specifically the master of Musawi and Musawi’s parents. He regrets that Saddam was killed by “the same people who killed our master Umar and our master Abu Bakr.” Then he seems to remember that Abu Bakr wasn’t killed, and says “Sorry. The people who hate Abu Bakr and all the companions of the Prophet.”

I found al-Jabouri’s ranting tragic to watch. For people like him, sectarian hatred supercedes even family loyalty. And as far as he is concerned, anyone who disagrees with Baathist tyranny or Sunni dominance of Iraq is not Iraqi and not Arab, but Persian.

As the American campaign against Iran intensifies, there is a corresponding chorus of paranoid voices in the Arab world howling about Persian imperialism and Shia infiltration. The chorus includes pro-American ‘liberals’ and anti-American Baathists and Wahhabi fundamentalists. The interests these Arabs ultimately serve are neither liberal nor anti-American.

Some Arabs wonder why Iran is involved in the Arab Levant. I see nothing particularly sinister in this engagement. Iran is an important regional power. If it is engaged in the area, so are America, Israel and France, and to a lesser extent Russia and Turkey. I would go so far as to say that Iran is a lot less ‘foreign’ than these other interventionists. And I greatly admire Iran for providing political, financial and military help to resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon. It’s not as if Hamas and Hizbullah turned down Arab aid in favour of the Iranians. Arab states have not only failed to help, they have actively conspired against the resistance and against the democratically elected government of occupied Palestine.

Some Arabs worry that Iran has become a regional superpower after the fall of the Iraqi Baath and the Afghan Taliban. But surely Iran can’t be blamed if it has become stronger as a result of American wars against erstwhile American clients. Although Iran had suffered horribly at the hands of Saddam Hussain, it didn’t help America to invade Iraq. The Saudis, however, provided land and airspace for the American campaign. True, Iran has relationships with some of the Iraqi Shia militia, just as the Saudis have relationships with Sunni militia, but some of the most important Shia militia – such as Sadr’s Mahdi Army – are Iraqi and Arab nationalists who oppose Iranian influence. The Iranian leadership more than Arab leaderships has called on Iraqis to avoid sectarian warfare, and has more to lose from Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq than the Sunni Arab client regimes.

Most absurdly, Yusuf Qaradawi, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Egyptian newspaper columnists have recently fulminated against supposed Shia-Iranian efforts to convert Sunnis to ‘the Shia heresy’ in Sunni-majority countries. There are two responses to this. The first is that there is absolutely no evidence that it is happening. In his Ashura speech in Beirut Hassan Nasrallah addressed this issue, calling on the Saudis to establish an investigation into such allegations. The second response is that, even if Shia were trying to convince Sunnis that their brand of belief is best, so what? What’s wrong with theological debate, so long as it doesn’t become coercion? Anyway, is it not obvious (and regrettable) that the best organised and funded Islamic evangelists in the world are Wahhabis?

What else is there for Arabs to fear from Iran? Some condemn Iran as a tyranny. It would be overly optimistic to call the Islamic Republic a democracy, but it is certainly more democratic than any Arab state. There are real, if controlled, elections, in which real issues are debated. There is a vibrant, if besieged, press and student movement. The hijab is imposed on Iranian women (many of them wear it slipping off the back of their heads), but Saudi women are forced to wear niqab, and are forbidden from driving. Iran makes wonderful films. Iranian high streets are full of bookshops, and the bookshops stock titles on Buddhism, yoga, contemporary European philosophy, quantum physics, Russian literature. The most popular language for internet blogs after English is Farsi. I wish the Arab world was more like Iran.

I don’t pretend that Iran doesn’t have serious problems. When I visited I was surprised by just how many people complain about the government. Not only young, Westernised English speakers. I can speak guidebook Farsi, and even working-class and middle-aged people would quickly express to me their hatred of the regime. But I took some heart from the fact that people would shout their opinions in Farsi in the middle of crowded teahouses. In no Arab country would people have so little fear.

The key conflict in the area is between the ruling class, which is both a money class and a client to imperialism, and the ordinary, impoverished people, who now have more information about the links between their rulers and Zionist and imperialist forces. The rulers of the region and of the world don’t want this conflict to be revealed in the light of day, so they seek to mask it by sectarian and ethnic conflicts. The classic divide and rule strategy. So Abdullah of Jordan, that shining hero of Islam, warns of the Shia crescent. Mubarak of Egypt, the gallant knight of Arabism, points out darkly that Arab Shia are always more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. Tony Blair recently referred to an ‘arc of moderation.’ Meaning, I suppose, the moderate anal rape tactics of the Egyptian police, and the moderate public beheadings in Saudi Arabia. It’s a shame to see so many Arabs, for reasons of sectarian prejudice, siding despite themselves with Blair and the Arab puppets. Some liberal Arabs who claim to be in favour of peace and moderation, dazzled by Western media, are falling into the same trap.

Apocalypto

The end times are everywhere. The country where millenarian fundamentalists have the most sway over foreign policy is probably the United States. That means the Empire is partially run by people for whom ‘Bring it on!’ has cosmic connotations. For America’s Christian Zionists, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was a clear sign that the end is near. Many have it carefully mapped out, from Rapture to Armageddon. And these days the apocalypse is almost as popular amongst Muslims. Many Sunnis like to point to the Signs of the Hour which they believe are already in place; my favourite, and one which is hard to argue with if you’ve visited Dubai or Riyadh, is ‘Beduin will compete in building high towers.’ The one-eyed dajjal or antichrist who will rule before the Mahdi, or guided-one, and the final return of Christ, is seen variously in the single eye of the dollar’s masonic pyramid or in the one-eyed television screen. I’ve even met someone who claims that their cousin saw the Mahdi in Mecca. Shia Muslims identify the Mahdi with the last, and hidden, Imam. Moqtada as-Sadr has frequently explained the build-up of US forces in the region over the past decade and a half as preparation of a rapid-reaction force to take on Imam al-Mahdi. The explosion in the shrine at Samara, the place where the final Imam was last seen, and chaos throughout Iraq – the holy land of Shiism – has naturally encouraged apocalypticism among Shia Muslims. But apocalypticism goes beyond the monotheisms. For some Hindus, we are reaching the end of Kali Yag, the age of darkness, which means this cycle of history is approaching a full stop. Doomsday cults thrive in Japan and Russia. Mayan prophecies locate the end in 2012. And, of course, environmentalists describe a hotter near future in which what we call civilisation could totally collapse, billions of us could die, and most of the world could become uninhabitable.

People have always worried about the apocalypse. An Assyrian clay tablet of 2800 BC says, “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.” But we seem to be having a spike in apocalypse-fantasies at the moment. There are good reasons for this.

Firstly, the power balance in the world is shifting dramatically. It’s a good bet that even if we are still here in a century, the world will look completely different. The West has been dominant for the last 500 years, to the extent that everybody now wears Western clothes, consumes Western cultural products, studies English, models their architecture, technology, state machineries and legal systems on Western prototypes. This century will see power shift decisively to China, India and other non-Western centres. It’s not at all clear what the consequences of this will be, but it’s natural that people’s dim sense of the huge change will expand to earth-shaking size.

Secondly, people everywhere feel lost, and frequently seek nihilistic compensations (fascism, Wahhabism, hedonist-consumerism, etc…), as they have been uprooted from their traditions and past. I include in this category young British people who don’t know the Bible or English literature, and therefore are disconnected from the long tradition of their culture, as much as tribesmen of the Southern Arabian peninsula who suddenly have no idea how to live without air conditioning and MTV, and who wouldn’t recognise desert poetry if it bit them on the nose. If your cultural rootedness reaches as far back as Britney Spears’ first release, it’s hard to conceptualise a non-exploding future.

Thirdly, the world capitalist system, to which there doesn’t seem to be any serious alternative, is clearly unsustainable. Marx’s suggestions about how to replace capitalism have all been discredited, but much of his basic criticism seems sounder now than ever before. Capitalism would be fine if it got stuck at the level of small business – a set-up which seems to me to be conducive of democracy and social responsibility – but capital inevitably concentrates, and corporations or state complexes take over. These cause ever bloodier and bigger wars. And the international concentration of capital is continuing apace. Marx said capitalism would inevitably morph into imperialism as capital seeks more capital and more markets. Well, look at the world. Marx said capitalism will inevitably commodify the natural environment and the human soul. Again, look about you.

Finally, there’s global warming, the environmental apocalypse. There is now very nearly consensus among scientists, although not among popular media and corporate-sponsored lobbyists, that climate change is happening very rapidly and is caused by our economic activity. If there is a 4 degree C increase in temperature over the century, as seems likely, our world will become significantly harsher even for the best-placed people. If there is a 6 degree increase, the scenario really is semi-apocalyptic. So what are we doing about it? Renouncing capitalism? Learning desert survival skills? Banning cars, planes, electric light and computers? Well, a few of us are buying energy-saving lightbulbs.

The more I talk about it the more convincing the prospect of apocalypse becomes. So it’s apt that Mel Gibson’s latest film, Apocalypto, addresses the issue head on. Gibson has hinted that Apocalypto is a critique of contemporary Western civilisation, specifically of the Iraq war. But that’s bollocks. What it really is is a celebration of Catholic imperialism as the answer to our problems. As such, it is much more problem than solution. The film mashes history to conflate Mayan and Aztec civilisations, implies that the great American city states were intact when Europeans arrived (in fact they collapsed centuries before), and portrays native Americans as, one the one hand, noble savages with an inarticulate, intuitive grasp of Catholic liturgy and, on the other, ignoble and very scary murderers. Much of the film is an extended chase scene structured around sub-Biblical imagery and prophecies of the end. The end for the wild men and redemption for the Christ-hero comes with the arrival of European ships, of bearded men in robes bearing crosses. The audience can’t help but think ‘Thank God for Christian Europe!’ Reality tells a different tale. Over 90% of native Americans died in the first century of European colonisation. Most of these were killed by European diseases, but many were killed by massacre. Genetic studies of the present population of Colombia, for instance, show what happened. Most Colombians are descendants of a group of European males and native females. So it was straightforward, kill the men or work them till they die, take the women for the bedroom. Not much redemption there.

The violence in the film is at times pornographic, in the sense that you feel Gibson must have actually had an erection while organising it. An example is the part when our hero clubs our villain in the head and blood spurts sideways for a good twenty seconds. The blood lust of the cinematic consumer, of course, is good and redemptive, while the blood lust of the savage Mayan-Aztec human sacrifice is bad and, well, savage.

A note on human sacrifice. Of course, human sacrifice was a grotesque and barbaric means of keeping people loyal to the ‘state,’ and was based on the worst superstition. Such practices are revealed in their spectacular and naked barbarism when you view them from outside the ideological prism in which they are performed. If aliens from the planet Zog were to invade the Earth, slaughter everybody, and burn our books, their archeologists would soon find Auschwitch, where Europeans recently committed mass slaughter for reasons of redemptive purity, or for that matter, Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have been killed in a slaughter sparked in the name of Democracy and Civilisation. Some of the worst superstitions.

If the Zog people wait a century, perhaps they won’t need to bother slaughtering us.

I should say before I go that Apocalypto is a wonderfully well-made, tremendously exciting and often beautiful film. Recommended, so long as genocidal reality doesn’t get in your way.

Bad Signs

Two things. First, Shaikh Yusuf Qaradawi. A ‘moderate conservative’ linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Qaradawi has previously made positive statements about the need for Sunni-Shia unity, particularly in Iraq. At the Doha Inter-Islamic Dialogue Conference a couple of days ago he condemned the cleansing of Sunnis from mixed or Shia areas. “No one can tolerate such unspeakable hatred,” he said. “Sunnis are suffering more in Iraq. I had repeatedly called upon the Shia scholars and leaders in Iraq and Iran to intervene to stop this bloodshed.” He continued, “Iran has influence in Iraq. It can stop this violence and put out the fire that could destroy everything.” Then he went on to complain about Shia attempts to convert Sunnis living in Sunni majority nations.

Qaradawi was right to raise the issue of Shia death squads. He was wrong to keep silent about Salafi/ Baathist/ extremist Sunni terrorism. The Shia of Iraq put up with more than two years of massacres before they began to respond.

When the Shii shrine of the last Imam in Samara was bombed, Qaradawi commented, “We cannot imagine that the Iraqi Sunnis did this. No-one benefits from such acts other than the American occupation and the lurking Zionst enemy.” Perhaps he has a point. But it looks a lot like when Sunnis commit crimes Qaradawi blames America, and when Shia commit crimes, he blames the Shia, and Iran. His paranoia about Shia conversion squads is also suspect. 90% of Muslims are Sunni. It doesn’t seem that is going to change. Why shouldn’t Shia, or anyone else, express their beliefs in public? If some Sunni are ‘converted’ it will be because they are convinced by Shia ideas. What’s the problem? The Prophet said al-ikhtilaf rahma, or difference of opinion is a mercy. If the aim is to defuse sectarian tension, surely what is needed is Sunni scholars who will publicly condemn extremist Sunni intolerance, and Shia scholars who will publicly condemn extremist Shia intolerance.

Second, Lebanon. Yesterday opposition strike action and street protests degenerated into fighting and rioting in which three people were killed and tens injured.

The conflict is political. The opposition (which includes almost all the Shia, half of the Christians, and a few Sunni) wants a more representative government. It is demanding enough cabinet places to give it veto power over government decisions. This seems fair to me. Better still would be a reformed electoral system, so that the vote of every Lebanese is worth the same. Currently the vote of a Christian is worth more than the vote of a Sunni, and that of a Shii is worth least of all.

The conflict also centres on economics and class issues. This is why the General Labour Confederation backed the opposition’s call for a strike yesterday. The government has been dramatically raising prices of basic goods and selling national assets to international corporations. Government figures like Marwan Hamade are making huge profits from the deals.

It is doubtful that the Cedar Revolution was supported by the majority in Lebanon, and its PR was certainly run by American companies, but it represented a widespread demand for an end to Syrian military presence and political interference. This is no longer the issue. Michel Aoun was perhaps Syria’s fiercest Lebanese opponent, but he is now in opposition to the so-called ‘anti-Syrian’ government. After the government’s half-hearted support for the resistance during the 2006 Israeli onslaught, all the Shia ministers resigned from the cabinet. The Shia are Lebanon’s largest community. Sinyura’s government is not representative, but it refuses to budge because its Saudi, Israeli and American backers are telling it to stand firm.

I have made it clear where my sympathies lie. You can disagree, for political or economic reasons. As I’ve said, the conflict is political and economic. But it is increasingly being understood in sectarian terms. What do working class Sunnis have in common with millionaire businessmen like Hariri and Sinyura? Absolutely nothing, except the mirage of sectarian identity. This mirage is so strong in certain Sunni heads that it has made them obey their banker leaders and stand with the killers and fascists of Geagea’s Lebanese Forces against those who defended Lebanon from Israeli attack last summer. I understand why opposition protesters held pictures of Nasrallah and Aoun yesterday – these are Lebanese figures. But why were Sunnis waving pictures of Saddam Hussain in the street? Only because Saddam was Sunni. A Sunni who murdered Shia.

I have a Lebanese friend who says he’s given up talking politics with other Lebanese. Tony says that after the civil war ended people began to talk about ideas, about left and right policies, about globalisation and imperialism, about economics, about democracy and rights. For a few years it felt to him that sect would never again be a basis for political discussion. But in the last months that has changed. An idea is judged by the sect of the person expressing it. It feels, says Tony, like the war years.

Escalation

It seems this broken region, and this broken world, are in for a further escalation of conflict in 2007.

The report of the US Congress-mandated Iraq Study Group recommended that US forces end direct participation in combat operations in Iraq and concentrate on training Iraqi troops instead. It also called for American dialogue with both Iran and Syria for the sake of stabilising Iraq. Although the report failed to recognise the gravity of the problems in Iraq (that there are no ‘Iraqi’ troops, for instance, only militiamen) or to propose serious political solutions, and although its authors still envisaged a long-term American controlling presence in the country, it nevertheless represented an acknowledgment that America is failing in Iraq, and an attempt to limit the damage.

Bush and his people are ignoring the report. Who are Bush’s people? On the one hand, there are traditional right-wing Republicans who are unable to countenance defeat, the kind of people who don’t understand that America was militarily defeated in Vietnam. If it hadn’t been for hippies and weak politicians at home, they think, we’d have smashed the Cong. We won’t be defeated again! And there are neo-con nihilists, believers in ‘creative chaos,’ ideologues often more loyal to Israel’s perceived interests than to America’s. Many commentators have claimed the neo-cons are in decline: I fear not. They have been repositioning, certainly – blaming Bush and Rumsfield for the conduct of the war in Iraq (but not the war itself), making themselves more attractive to the right-wing of the Democratic party. It is very important to remember that as far as large sections of the American ruling class are concerned the Iraq war has not been a failure.

When people examine the war from a human perspective, when they consider the 650, 000 Iraqi dead, the millions of internal and external refugees, the tens of millions suffering poverty, trauma and the effects of Depleted Uranium, when they consider too the 3, 000 American dead, it seems obvious that the war has been a disaster. When we examine the war according to its supposed aims, we see that it has failed on every one. To capture Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? There were no weapons of mass destruction. To establish democracy? Instead of democracy there is gang rule, civil war and sectarian hatred. To enshrine human rights? The United Nations says that torture is more prevalent in Iraq now than under Saddam, and the Americans themselves have done their bit for torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. To promote secularism at the expense of Islamism? One of the most secular Arab countries is now ruled by competing groups of fundamentalist clerics. To stop terrorism? The presence of violent Salafi groups in Iraq has risen from zero before the invasion to plague proportions now.

But look at the real reasons for the invasion and the picture becomes rosier. Corporations like (Cheney’s) Halliburton have made huge profits reconstructing Iraq despite the fact that nothing has been reconstructed. For these (overwhelmingly American) business interests, Iraq has been a risk-free investment. The American taxpayer foots the bill, whatever the result. The government (staffed by the same people who staff the corporations and the media) signed the contracts. Moreover, it looks like an oil law committing Iraq to long-term agreements with foreign corporations is about to be pushed through the parliament. It should be noted that many parliamentarians do not live in Iraq. The United States has seen drafts of the oil law, but the Iraqi public, and many Iraqi parliamentarians, haven’t. Another positive result: Iraq may be a danger to itself, but it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to be a danger again to the puppet monarchies of the Gulf, or to Israel. Plus this benefit: the Arab and Muslim masses, who only six years ago seemed increasingly united in opposition to Israel and American imperialism, increasingly aware and politically active, are now consumed with sectarian and petty-nationalist rivalries.

Yes, Americans are dying, but usually only blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. Plenty of mercenaries from South America, South Africa and Eastern Europe are being killed too, but they aren’t officially members of the American armed forces, so their deaths are not reported. The American tax payer is losing – but that’s the tax payer, and not the ruling class.

The novelist Thomas Pynchon offered two approaches for understanding the contemporary world: either as chaos, which he called entropy, or by paranoia, the assumption that everything is organised by hidden conspiracy. Most Westerners, being trusting folk, prefer the chaos explanation. That is, the Washington and London ‘experts’ really did expect to find nuclear missiles in Saddam’s bathroom; they really did think the Iraqi Muslim masses would welcome GIs with flowers; they thought Depleted Uranium was good for you; they believed radical Islamists would want only to disco dance in Tel Aviv once they’d tasted American candy. Me, I don’t think so. In the case of Iraq, I tend to paranoia. Bush may be a chimpanzee who hadn’t heard the word ‘shia’ until last Tuesday, but he is surrounded by professionals, men with PhDs, by intelligence men. These people guessed what would happen. It wasn’t difficult to foresee. I foresaw it, and I’m not paid to study the region. They understand Arab and Muslim weaknesses, Arab and Muslim backwardness, better than the Arabs and Muslims do themselves. It’s very depressing to watch the Muslims, particularly the Arabs, fall into the traps which have been laid for them.

The one failure of the war, from the point of view of the ruling classes, is that Iran has been inadvertantly strengthened by the fall of the Baathist regime. So 2007 is the year to destroy Iran.

Attempts are well underway to neutralise Iran’s allies. In Palestine, Abu Mazen’s Fatah goons are being armed by Israel, Jordan and Egypt to take on the elected Hamas government. In Lebanon, Sinyora’s government is being funded (and some say armed) by Saudi Arabia and America to strengthen it against the legitimate demands (for a representative government) of Hizbullah and its allies. It looks as if the American ‘surge’ in Iraq will be directed against as-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi.

Meanwhile, patriot missiles are being sent to Gulf states which host large American military bases, and extra warships are being deployed in the Gulf. These weapons have nothing to do with Iraq, and everything to do with Iran. The recent arrest of the Iranian diplomats in Iraqi Kurdistan seems designed to provoke Iran into actions which can be used to justify war. We should expect further provocation.

America cannot sustain a ground invasion of Iran. From what I read it (or Israel) is more likely to launch intense air attacks on Iranian military and infrastructural targets. The campaign will be followed by efforts to incite rebellion among ethnic minorities in Iran – Balush, Arabs, Azeris and Kurds. The aim is to keep the Iranians so busy they won’t be able to project power beyond their borders. If the plan works (and I don’t think it will – Iran is more cohesive and less traumatised than Iraq), we can expect to see the kind of ‘busyness’ in Iran that we are seeing in Iraq.

Of course, I exaggerate when I say the War on Terror has been an unqualified victory for the empire. America’s imperialistic hubris is losing it influence and respect throughout the world. America’s essentially third world nature is becoming more and more apparent – hysterically nationalist, religiously fundamentalist, educationally backward, a country with vast divergences between classes and ethnic groups, with a propagandist media, whose government is controlled by vested interests. Empires are sustained by consensus as much as by coercion, and there is no longer anything resembling consensus that America is a serious candidate for global governance. The probable attack on Iran will be America’s Suez moment. America will win militarily, but lose, massively, politically. It’s all bad for America (remember America is not the same as the American ruling class), and worse for the Middle East.

Erm .. Happy New Year!

Executing Saddam

On his excellent ‘In the Axis’ blog (http://www.readingeagle.com/blog/syria/) Brian Anthony complains about the Sunni Arab world and international organisations protesting the execution of Saddam Hussain. Quite rightly, Brian objects to the tendency of many Sunnis to turn a blind eye to Saddam’s crimes. He also suggests that Sunnis may actively support repression of Shia in Iraq.

Saddam was certainly a murderous tyrant. He was helped to power by the CIA first in order to destroy the powerful Iraqi Communist Party, and then funded and armed by the US, Europe and the Gulf regimes to attack revolutionary Iran. He poisoned Iranian cities and Kurdish villages (Iraqi Kurdish militias were in alliance with Iran at the time) with gas. After falling into the American trap and invading Kuwait, he dealt with the 1991 intifada in the south and north of Iraq by annihilating whole clans and villages. This is when the sectarian horror really began to take a grip on Iraq. Tanks painted with the slogan ‘No Shia after Today’ moved into southern cities, and provided ample filling for mass graves. The aunt of one of my friends was driven insane when her sons were tortured to death by Saddam’s mukhabarat: just one story from very many. Saddam didn’t only build the worst secret police state in the Middle East, he actually organised rape squads, and special rape rooms, to destroy Iraqi women and Iraqi family honour. His victims number in the hundreds of thousands, and millions if you include the wars he started.

I still think it is legitimate to oppose his execution for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, I oppose the death penalty. Sure, if anyone deserves it, Saddam does, but I still oppose the death penalty for a range of political and moral (and Islamic) reasons, and in every circumstance. My opposition to capital punishment requires a posting by itself, but in brief: I don’t believe the state should ever be given the ‘right’ to kill; I don’t believe that impartial justice has ever been practised by any state; I don’t believe the death penalty has a deterrent effect; although capital punishment was practised by the first Muslims (who didn’t have prisons, and who were seeking to stop tribal feuding), the detail of Sharia law suggests that it is better not to kill a criminal if an acceptable alternative punishment can be found.

Secondly, the execution was carried out in a nasty sectarian manner. Inasmuch as I support any ‘side’ in Iraq I support the Shia, and I know they have very good reason to want revenge. But for the sake of Iraq, if we had to have taunting of Saddam in his last moments, we should have had a speech read out about his crimes to Shias and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds. Although Shias suffered disproportionately under the Baathist regime, Sunnis were also persecuted, and the regime included Shia ministers and generals. Chanting ‘Moqtada’ at the execution, while a civil war is raging, does not help bring peace to Iraq, and Iraqi peace is more important than Saddam the individual.

Thirdly, carrying out the execution at the time of Eid prayers seems like a calculated insult to the sentiments of Muslims. Eid is supposed to be a time of peace and reconciliation, and it falls in the months when bloodshed is prohibited. Of course, Saddam did worse things against Islam, and Muslims have spilled plenty of blood in the holy months, but that’s no justification. I resented spending the Eid days fielding questions from my children about the famous man who was choked to death, just as any Christian would feel uncomfortable talking about the electric chair on Christmas morning.

Fourthly, and most importantly, Saddam should have been kept alive to face charges for his major crimes (not just the local and relatively small scale crime of Dujail) in a properly transparent trial. The US, Europe and Gulf regimes didn’t want this because it would have exposed their complicity in his repression of Communists and Shia and his gas attacks on Iranian cities and Kurdish villages. But the Iraqi government should have insisted on a real trial, which would have shown Sunni Arabs (whether they wanted to listen or not) the extent to which Saddam was a brutal puppet rather than a nationalist leader.

If it is simple revenge that was sought (and, yes, I think the majority of Iraqis burned for revenge against Saddam), I would have preferred to this partially-transparent, American-run trial, of which bits were televised but the sound was cut whenever anyone said anything controversial, and during which defense lawyers were assassinated, that Saddam had been released into the streets of Basra or Kirkuk. We’d have got the blood, without the farce.

Compare the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa to this ugly charade of justice. Compare the cultural and economic success of new South Africa (albeit marred by crime) to the sectarian, criminal, bloody chaos of occupied Iraq.