It always amazes, disturbs and frustrates me when even intelligent, informed people confidently state that Saddam's Iraq and Al Qaeda were intimately connected before the war, implying of course that had we not invaded Iraq, eventually their mythical WMDs would have been used against us by the terrorists. This implication is even now frequently used by Bush apologists seeking to retrospectively justify our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq as a legitimate form of direct retribution against those who attacked us on 9/11.
The idea of such a connection - first created by the Bush administration based using tenuous and now widely discredited intelligence, fostered by an unquestioning press, and repeated until for many it has become an accepted truth - is even
still being posited today by radical conservatives. Though not quite as direct about it, the Bush administration still seems to imply a connection, for example, when Bush repeatedly refers to Iraq as the "
central front in the War on Terror".
However, I've also been sensing something else at work below the surface arguments justifying the war: the subtle impression from certain media commentators, journalists and others that somehow all Arabs and Muslims are essentially the same, and more importantly, they are "not like us". The unspoken logic seems to go something like this: "All terrorists are evil. The 9/11 terrorists were Arabs, so all Arabs are evil." Alternatively, "The terrorists were Islamic militants, so Islam is an evil religion." This prejudice is only inflamed by Bush's polarized rhetoric of good and evil, "with us or against us", "Axis of evil", and so on, and by the Biblical pronouncements of some who should know better. Of course, it's not usually stated quite so blatantly, but this undercurrent of separating "them" and "us" seems to be a recurring theme which just feeds into the closet public (mis-) perception that as long as we're over there killing Arabs - any Arabs - then we're also avenging our 3,000 innocent dead.
Historically, this collective demonization of a whole race is not unique or even particularly unusual, and as Hitler most clearly demonstrated it can be a very dangerous path to follow. Of course the generalizations behind it are demonstrably absurd; clearly, there are terrorists in our own culture (Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, even the KKK), and there are equally many millions of ordinary Arabs who have no desire or intention to perpetrate acts of terrorism on others; yet sometimes these truths bear repeating. It's telling, I think, that the first reports in the media of the Oklahoma City bombing simply assumed that an Arab terrorist group was responsible. Perhaps it's easier for us as a nation to blame an identifiable external group than it is to deal with our own internal prejudices.
There are roughly 1.2 million Arabs in the U.S. - less than half a percent of the population. I venture that few Americans know any Arabs, much less have discussed politics or religion with them, and that most Americans have never even met an Arab in a social setting. So our impressions of a whole race are necessarily created by the news media and by Hollywood, which often casts an evil, grinning, suspiciously dusky-skinned person as the archetypal movie villain - but never an Arab as the Hero or Heroine.
Such lack of awareness and stereotyping almost inevitably leads to ignorance, which is at the root of racial and religious prejudice. Let be me clear that I'm not suggesting that any one person, or even all Americans are racists; simply that institutional racism is one of the skeletons in our collective historical closet that still unconsciously influences our cultural attitudes, and yet rarely seems to get talked about much. To me it's no coincidence that African Americans (who as a group know more than most about the realities of racism) are most solidly united against the Iraq war.
So while I understand that there are many real and largely unspoken ideological, political and economic reasons behind this war (oil, for example), I suggest that there is also an aspect of our cultural racism rearing its ugly head once again. Only by naming it in this latest incarnation can we ever have any hope of transcending it.
- Trendar