Orientalist Mindset as the Gravest Threat to Sovereignty - Coursework Example

October 09, 2008 War on Terror: Fighting a self-conjured Phantom? When the twin towers fell in the September 11, 2001 attacks, so did theperceived cloak of invincibility of a nation of people who loved to bask in the cosy comfort zone of assured security. That comfort zone was shattered, and what had so far been taken for granted – the sacred belief that the war would always be remote and distant – was proved to be a fallacy. This was an attack right on Homeland. The enemy had proved that it could strike, and strike at the very heart of home. It was as if the war had jumped out of television sets right into the living rooms and bedrooms of homes in the United States. This single incident was by itself proof that the threat of terrorism was real enough, perceptible enough and urgent enough to merit the highest degree of priority, attention and action. But in order to be able to do so, people needed some image, at least some kind of a symbolic representation to focus on, to vent their anger on, to target the missiles on and perhaps to take out their frustrations on. Such a symbolic image had however already been in the making since long. Its embryonic existence can be traced as far back as the days of the Crusades, its simmering shape could be discerned in the creation of the Jewish state of Israel and thereafter in the continued tussle between Israel on one hand and the Palestinians and the Arab nations on the other. The Iran-Iraq war, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the Russian withdrawal, the Taliban takeover, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War had all served to make the shape of that image more and distinct over time. The 9/11 attacks made imperative the unveiling of the image of all evil inherent in a single word – ‘terror’. President George Bush, in his September 14, 2001 speech at Washington’s National Cathedral, made the following declaration to a nation that was still to come out of the initial shock: “Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” (Bush, 2001, pp. 5) The President then went on to state in no uncertain terms that the United States “is fighting a war against terrorism of global reach.” (Bush, 2001, pp. 5) Subsequent references to a concerted fight against terrorism on a worldwide scale by the President and others of the administration finally led to the coinage of the now formal and widely accepted term ‘Global War on Terrorism’ along with its acronym GWOT. This war, like all other wars, had to have a perceptible enemy. That collective enemy was identified as al-Qaeda, and all terror and terrorism was manifest in the hydra-headed monster called al-Qaeda which had made its presence felt in a way that many had deemed impossible. al-Qaeda had a face – that of the turbaned and bearded angry Islamic terrorist. Seven years hence, with the advantage of hindsight, the world has been forced to pause and take a hard second look at the enemy that the GWOT is fighting. Is ‘terror’ and its manifest image the al-Qaeda something real and based on hard facts? Or is the GWOT fighting a figment of our collective imagination, while the real terror and the real enemy rage on unabated and unchecked, while the very security we so treasure is compromised? The Orientalist Mindset In its narrowest meaning, the term ‘Orientalism’ generally refers to views or attitudes that reflect a stereotypical concept of the relationship between the Occident and the Orient, where this term is limited to those lands where Europe’s greatest and oldest colonies were found (Said, 2000, pp. 68). In the present context however, ‘orientalism’ or the ‘orientalist mindset’ indicates a preconceived notion of the eastern world, primarily the Islamic nations, as harbored by a large majority in the United States, especially of those who are politically and socially positioned to call the shots in international affairs such as the GWOT. Said (2003, pp. 3) states that the ‘orient’ has been a semi-mythical construct since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late 18th Century, and goes on to say that the current general impression and understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam particularly in the United States is in the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliché. It is the orientalist mindset which conjures up absurd phenomena such as the Arab mind and the centuries-old Islamic decline, and finds excuses to wage war in the name of reversing the so-called decadence in the Islamic world. “It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials (they’ve been called chickenhawks, since none of them ever served in the military) was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.” (Said, 2003, pp. 4) The media chips in to play its own role in propagating the orientalist mindset so that entire generations are ultimately made to subscribe to the views of the orientalist, to a very one-dimensional West Vs Islam view of the world. Had it not been for the Orientalist dogma and the presence of precious oil in the region, the Middle East would possibly not have drawn as much attention and misery as it has now. Time and again, specialized jargon of policy expertise such as facilitating the domino effect of democracy has been used to justify the implementation of policies that have been oppressive for the Middle East. At other times the inhabitants of the region itself have been charged with indulging in stagnant self pity for the exploitation that it has suffered at the hands of different empires throughout history, and therefore blamed squarely for bringing about its own plight. The other side of the coin also reveals an equally dogmatic response steeped in mindless anti-Americanism and the rule of Islamist orthodoxy. Matters have therefore come to a head, and the orientalist mindset has threatened to become the gravest threat to sovereignty and international order. Evidence in History A careful examination of the history of the Middle East and the role played by the United States provides glaring evidence of the blundering footsteps of the orientalist mindset. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the Eighties had prompted the United States to organize and arm the Mujahedins in an effort to curb and curtail Soviet influence in the area. When the Soviets left Afghanistan, the same Mujahedins became the enemy that would ultimately be known as the al-Qaeda. Almost during the same time, when Iran had dared to challenge United States’ dominance in the region, American policy makers had befriended Saddam Hussein and helped Iraq in its war against Iran. However, when Iraq had invaded Kuwait, the United States felt that its interests in the Middle East were being threatened and turned on its old friend. The United States had pursued a policy of ‘today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy’ much in keeping with the approach of the orientalist mindset. Post 9/11, the trend has been even more obvious and with far more disastrous consequences. The knee-jerk reaction of waging the GWOT against Afghanistan backfired. The United States objective of democratizing Afghanistan failed miserably at the cost of thousands of innocent Afghan lives. At the very best, it could have only strengthened the hands of the perceived enemy – the al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq exemplifies the kind of Herculean blunder that the orientalist mindset could lead to. All throughout, The GWOT has focused more on the role of rogue states and the potential threat of use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) by such states. Iraq, Iran and North Korea fall in the category of rogue states. Operation Iraqi Freedom is cited as the most evident example that the GWOT is an invention of the United and its allies to serve their own power and financial interests. GWOT is not a war on terrorism but a war against weaker but richer nations to divest them of their power, influence and wealth. In 2003, President Bush had proclaimed Operation Iraqi Freedom as a victory, and as a direct consequence of the 9/11 attacks: “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more. In this 19 months [since the 9/11 attacks] that changed the world, our actions have been focused and deliberate and proportionate to the offense . . . .With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.” (Milbank & Deane, 2003) Today, five years from the day of that proclamation, Operation Iraqi Freedom looks increasingly like the biggest blunder that the United States and its allies in the war on terrorism could have made. The United States had gone into Iraq to rid it of its armament of nuclear weapons and other WMDs. It did not anticipate getting bogged down in the country fighting a sustained war against guerilla fighters. It also failed to find Iraq’s stock of nuclear weapons or WMDs. The toll in terms of lives and money has been enormous counting both US and Iraqi casualties. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake. That has to be accepted. The Bush administration had spotted a link between the Saddam Hussein regime and the al-Qaeda. There was a suspicion that Saddam Hussein had had a direct hand in the 9/11 attacks. The President was wide off the mark when he had commented that one could not differentiate between the al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in the context of the war on terrorism (Allen, 2002). In conflating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, the Bush administration had unnecessarily expanded the GWOT by launching a preventive war against a state that was not at war with the United States and that posed no direct or imminent threat to the United States at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the United States from a terrorist organization with which the United States was at war (Record, 2003, pp. 18). Here we find evidence of the orientalist mindset at work again. North Korea and Iran are next in line as probable targets of this unreasonable approach. Conclusions Mostafa & Al-Hamidi (2007) has in a very interesting study has empirically established that Arab support for the 9/11 attacks on the United States stem not from a clash of civilizations as would be advocated by the orientalist mindset but predominantly because of an anti-dominance reaction to perceived American hegemony in the Middle East. However, Arabic and Islamic cultures are often seen to overlap because a majority of he Arab population practices Islam. And political Islam or radical Islam is viewed as a cultural conflict that leads terrorists and terrorism. In Western perceptions, political Islam is unique not because it uses religion for political purposes in order to create national identity or transform society. It is seen as uniquely threatening because it can also be used as an instrument to challenge, sometimes by violent means, the West’s global dominance (Ayoob 2004). Even though the al-Qaeda has been identified as the enemy in the GWOT, there seems to be considerable confusion and vagueness in estimates of its strength and in defining the nature of its operatives. “There is a great deal that remains unknown or debatable about the specific nature, size, structure and reach of the organization, despite many years of studying it.” (Cronin, 2003, pp. 3) In fact al-Qaeda has been described as a conglomeration comprising of a multitude of organizations, similar in structure to a modern corporation. There is even uncertainty in ascertaining whether the organization has actually grown or diminished in strength after all these years of the Great War of Terror being waged against. All these doubts and uncertainties lend credence to the fact that the orientalist mindset prevalent in the West and in the United States has set the GWOT on the wrong track. We are fighting a phantom of our own making. The security and sovereignty of the entire international community has been threatened in the process. What is required is a new new security agenda based in part on the recognition that most of the world’s six and a half billion people are threatened by problems that are unrelated to weapons of mass destruction and terrorist networks (Cardwell & Williams, 2006, pp. 1-2). References 1. Allen, M., (2002), Bush: Hussein, Al Qaeda Linked, Washington Post, September 26, 2002. 2. Ayoob, M., (2004), Political Islam: Image and reality. World Policy Journal 21:1–14. 3. Bush, G., W., (2001), Remarks by President Bush at the 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy at West Point, West Point Speech, Retrieved October 07, 2008 from http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html 4. Cardwell, D., Williams, R., (2006), The Meaning of Security Today. In Seeking Security In an Insecure World. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 5. Cronin, A., K., 2003, Al Qaeda after the Iraq Conflict, CRS Report for Congress. 6. Milbank, D., and Deane, C., (2003), Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds, Washington Post, September 6, 2003. 7. Mostafa, M., M., Al-Hamidi, M., T., (2007), Political Islam, Clash of Civilizations, U.S. Dominance and Arab Support of Attacks on America: A Test of a Hierarchical Model, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group 8. Record, J., (2003), Bounding the Global War on Terrorism, Monograph, Strategic Studies Institute, ISBN 1-58487-146-6. 9. Said, E. (2003), Orientalism Once More, Institute of Social Studies, Academic Ceremony on the 50th Anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague 10. Said, E., (2000), Orientalism. In The Edward Said Reader, (1978), eds. M. Byoumi and A. Rubin. New York: Vintage Books. Read More