THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE IS THE TRUE DANGER?
by Slavoj Zizek

We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle
which Freud quotes in order to render the strange
logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually
exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a
friend a broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed a kettle
from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the
kettle was already broken when I got it from you. For
Freud, such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments
of course confirms per negationem what it endeavors to
deny - that I returned you a broken kettle... Do we
not encounter the same inconsistency when high US
officials try to justify the attack on Iraq? (1) There
is a link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda, so
Saddam should be punished as part of the revenge for
9/11; (2) even if there was no link between Iraqi
regime and al Qaeda, they are united in their hatred
of the US - Saddam's regime is a really bad one, a
threat not only to the US, but also to its neighbors,
and we should liberate the Iraqi people; (3) the
change of regime in Iraq will create the conditions
for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The problem is that there are TOO MANY
reasons for the attack... Furthermore, one is almost
tempted to claim that, within the space of this
reference to the Freudian logic of dreams, the Iraqi
oil supplies function as the famous "umbilical cord"
of the US justification(s) - almost tempted, since it
would perhaps be more reasonable to claim that there
are also three REAL reasons for the attack: (1) the
control of the Iraqi oil reserves; (2) the urge to
brutally assert and signal the unconditional US
hegemony; (3) the "sincere" ideological belief that
the US are bringing to other nations democracy and
prosperity. And it seems as if these three "real"
reasons are the "truth" of the three official reasons:
(1) is the truth of the urge to liberate Iraqis; (2)
is the truth of the claim the attack on Iraq will help
to resolve the Middle East conflict; (3) is the truth
of the claim that there is a link between Iraq and
al-Qaeda. - And, incidentally, opponents of the war
seem to repeat the same inconsistent logic: (1) Saddam
is really bad, we also want to see him toppled, but we
should give inspectors more time, since inspectors are
more efficient; (2) it is all really about the control
of oil and American hegemony - the true rogue state
which terrorizes others are the US themselves; (3)
even if successful, the attack on Iraq will give a big
boost to a new wave of the anti-American terrorism;
(4) Saddam is a murderer and torturer, his regime a
criminal catastrophe, but the attack on Iraq destined
to overthrow Saddam will cost too much...
The one good argument for war is the one recently
evoked by Christopher Hitchens: one should not forget
that the majority of Iraqis effectively are Saddam's
victims, and they would be really glad to get rid of
them. He was such a catastrophe for his country that
an American occupation in WHATEVER form may seem a
much brighter prospect to them with regard to daily
survival and much lower level of fear. We are not
talking here of "bringing Western democracy to Iraq,"
but just of getting rid of the nightmare called
Saddam. To this majority, the caution expressed by
Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical
- do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?
One can make even a more general point here: what
about pro-Castro Western Leftists who despise what
Cubans themselves call "gusanos /worms/," those who
emigrated - but, with all sympathy for the Cuban
revolution, what right does a typical middle class
Western Leftist have to despise a Cuban who decided to
leave Cuba not only because of political
disenchantment, but also because of poverty which goes
up to simple hunger? In the same vein, I myself
remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western
Leftists who proudly threw in my face how for them,
Yugoslavia still exists, and reproached me for
betraying the unique chance of maintaining Yugoslavia
- to which I always answered that I am not yet ready
to lead my life so that it will not disappoint Western
Leftist dreams... There are effectively few things
more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more
ideological (if this word has any meaning today, it
should be applied here) than a tenured Western
academic Leftist arrogantly dismissing (or, even
worse, "understanding" in a patronizing way) an
Eastern European from a Communist country who longs
for Western liberal democracy and some consumerist
goods... However, it is all too easy to slip from this
fact to the notion that "under their skin, Iraqis are
also like us, and really want the same as we do." The
old story will repeat itself: America brings to the
people new hope and democracy, but, instead of hailing
the US army, the ungrateful people do want it, they
suspect a gift in the gift, and America then reacts as
a child with hurt feelings because of the ingratitude
of those it selflessly helped.
The underlying presupposition is the old one: under
our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all
Americans, that is our true desire - so all is needed
is just to give people a chance, liberate them from
their imposed constraints, and they will join us in
our ideological dream... No wonder that, in February
2003, an American representative used the word
"capitalist revolution" to describe what Americans are
now doing: exporting their revolution all around the
world. No wonder they moved from "containing" the
enemy to a more aggressive stance. It is the US which
is now, as the defunct USSR was decades ago, the
subversive agent of a world revolution. When Bush
recently said "Freedom is not America's gift to other
nations, it is god's gift to humanity," this apparent
modesty nonetheless, in the best totalitarian fashion,
conceals its opposite: yes, BUT it is nonetheless the
US which perceives itself as the chosen instrument of
distributing this gift to all the nations of the
world!
The idea to "repeat Japan in 1945," to bring democracy
to Iraq, which will then serve as model for the entire
Arab world, enabling people to get rid of the corrupt
regimes, immediately faces an insurmountable obstacle:
what about Saudi Arabia where it is in the vital US
interest that the country does NOT turn into
democracy? The result of democracy in Saudi Arabia
would have been either the repetition of Iran in 1953
(a populist regime with an anti-imperialist twist) or
of Algeria a couple of years ago, when the
"fundamentalists" WON the free elections.
There is nonetheless a grain of truth in Rumsfeld's
ironic pun against the "old Europe." The French-German
united stand against the US policy apropos Iraq should
be read against the background of the French-German
summit a month ago in which Chirac and Schroeder
basically proposed a kind of dual Franco-German
hegemony over the European Community. So no wonder
that anti-Americanism is at its strongest in "big"
European nations, especially France and Germany: it is
part of their resistance to globalization. One often
hears the complaint that the recent trend of
globalization threatens the sovereignty of the
Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this
statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this
threat? It is not the small states, but the
second-rate (ex-)world powers, countries like United
Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that,
once fully immersed in the newly emerging global
Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as,
say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal
of "Americanization" in France, shared by many
Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus ultimately
the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is
losing its hegemonic role in Europe. The leveling of
weight between larger and smaller Nation-States should
thus be counted among the beneficial effects of
globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of
the new Eastern European post-Communist states, it is
easy to discern the contours of the wounded Narcissism
of the European "great nations." And this
great-state-nationalism is not just a feature external
to the (failure of) the present opposition; it affects
the very way France and Germany articulated this
opposition. Instead of doing, even more actively,
precisely what Americans are doing - MOBILIZING the
"new European" states on their own politico-military
platform, ORGANIZING the common new front -, France
and Germany arrogantly acted alone.
In the recent French resistance against the war on
Iraq, there definitely is a clear echo of the "old
decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting, by
new resolutions upon resolutions - all this
reminiscent of the inactivity of the League of Nations
against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call
"let the inspectors do their work" clearly IS
hypocritical: they are only allowed to do the work
because there is a credible threat of military
intervention. Not to mention the French neocolonialism
in Africa (from Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French
role in the Rwanda crisis and massacres)? And about
the French role in the Bosnian war? Furthermore, as it
was made clear a couple of months ago, is it not clear
that France and Germany worry about their own hegemony
in Europe?
Is the war on Iraq not the moment of truth when the
"official" political distinctions are blurred?
Generally, we live in a topsy-turvy world in which
Republicans freely spend money, creating record budget
deficits, while Democrats practice budget balance; in
which Republicans, who thunder against big government
and preach devolution of power to states and local
communities, are in the process of creating the
strongest state mechanism of control in the entire
history of humanity. And the same applies to
post-Communist countries. Symptomatic is here the case
of Poland: the most ardent supporter of the US
politics in Poland is the ex-Communist president
Kwasniewski (who is even mentioned as the future
secretary of NATO, after George Robertson), while the
main opposition to the participation of Poland in the
anti-Iraq coalition comes from the Rightist parties.
Towards the end of January 2003, the Polish bishops
also demanded from the government that it should add
to the contract which regulates the membership of
Poland in the EU a special paragraph guaranteeing that
Poland will "retain the right to keep its fundamental
values as they are formulated in its constitution" -
by which, of course, are meant the prohibition of
abortion, of euthanasia and of the same-sex marriages.
The very ex-Communist countries which are the most
ardent supporters of the US "war on terror" deeply
worry that their cultural identity, their very
survival as nations, is threatened by the onslaught of
cultural "americanization" as the price for the
immersion into global capitalism - we thus witness the
paradox of pro-Bushist anti-Americanism. In Slovenia,
my own country, there is a similar inconsistency: the
Rightist nationalist reproach the ruling Center-Left
coalition that, although it is publicly for joining
NATO and supporting the US anti-terrorist campaign, it
is secretly sabotaging it, participating in it for
opportunist reasons, not out of conviction. At the
same time, however, it is reproaching the ruling
coalition that it wants to undermine Slovene national
identity by advocating full Slovene integration into
the Westernized global capitalism and thus drowning
Slovenes into contemporary Americanized pop-culture.
The idea is that the ruling coalition sustains pop
culture, stupid TV amusement, mindless consumption,
etc., in order to turn Slovenes into an easily
manipulated crowd unable of serious reflection and
firm ethical posture... In short, the underlying motif
is that the ruling coalition stands for the
"liberal-Communist plot" : ruthless unconstrained
immersion in global capitalism is perceived as the
latest dark plot of ex-Communists enabling them to
retain their secret hold on power.
The almost tragic misunderstanding is that the
nationalists, on the one hand, unconditionally support
NATO (under the US command), reproaching the ruling
coalition with secretly supporting antiglobalists and
anti-American pacifists, while, on the other hand,
they worry about the fate of Slovene identity in the
process of globalization, claiming that the ruling
coalition wants to throw Slovenia into the global
whirlpool, not worrying about the Slovene national
identity. Ironically, the new emerging
socio-ideological order these nationalist
conservatives are bemoaning reads like the old New
Left description of the "repressive tolerance" and
capitalist freedom as the mode of appearance of
unfreedom. Here, the example of Italy is crucial, with
Berlusconi as prime minister: the staunchest supporter
of the US AND the agent of the TV-idiotizing of the
public opinion, turning politics into a media show and
running a large advertisement and media company.
Where, then, do we stand with reasons pro et contra?
Abstract pacifism is intellectually stupid and morally
wrong - one has to stand up against a threat. Of
course the fall of Saddam would have been a relief to
a large majority of the Iraqi people. Even more, of
course the militant Islam is a horrifying
anti-feminist etc. ideology. Of course there is
something of a hypocrisy in all the reasons against:
the revolt should come from Iraqi people themselves;
we should not impose our values on them; war is never
a solution; etc. BUT, although all this is true, the
attack is wrong - it is WHO DOES IT that makes it
wrong. The reproach is: WHO ARE YOU TO DO THIS? It is
not war or peace, it is the correct "gut feeling" that
there is something terribly wrong with THIS war, that
something will irretrievably change with it.
One of Jacques Lacan's outrageous statements is that,
even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife
(that she sleeps around with other men) is all true,
his jealousy is still pathological; along the same
lines, one could say that, even of most of the Nazi
claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans,
they seduce German girls...), their anti-Semitism
would still be (and was) pathological - because it
represses the true reason WHY the Nazis NEEDED
anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological
position. And the same should be said today, apropos
of the US claim "Saddam has weapons of mass
destruction!" - even if this claim is true (and it
probably is, at least to some degree), it is still
false with regard to the position from which it is
enunciated.
Everyone fears the catastrophic outcome of the US
attack on Iraq: an ecological catastrophe of gigantic
proportions, high US casualties, a terrorist attack in
the West... In this way, we already accept the US
standpoint - and it is easy to imagine how, if the war
will be over soon, in a kind of repetition of the 1990
Gulf War, if Saddam's regime will disintegrate fast,
there will be a universal sigh of relief even among
many present critics of the US policy. One is even
tempted to consider the hypothesis that the US are on
purpose fomenting this fear of an impending
catastrophe, counting on the universal relief when the
catastrophe will NOT occur... This, however, is
arguably the greatest true danger. That is to say, one
should gather the courage to proclaim the opposite:
perhaps, the bad military turn for the US would be the
best thing that can happen, a sobering piece of bad
news which would compel all the participants to
rethink their position.
On 9/11 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years
earlier, on 11/9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. 11/9
announced the "happy 90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream
of the "end of history," the belief that liberal
democracy has in principle won, that the search is
over, that the advent of a global liberal world
community lurks round the corner, that the obstacles
to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are just
empirical and contingent, local pockets of resistance
where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is
over; in contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of
the end of the Clintonite happy 90s, of the
forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging
everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around
the European Union, on the US-Mexican border. The
prospect of a new global crisis is looming: economic
collapses, military and other catastrophes, emergency
states...
And when politicians start to directly justify their
decisions in ethical terms, one can be sure that
ethics is mobilized to cover up such dark threatening
horizons. It is the very inflation of abstract ethical
rhetorics in George W. Bush's recent public statements
(of the "Does the world have the courage to act
against the Evil or not?" type) which manifests the
utter ETHICAL misery of the US position - the function
of ethical reference is here purely mystifying, it
merely serves to mask the true political stakes, which
are not difficult to discern. In their recent The War
Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan
wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not
end there. /.../ We stand at the cusp of a new
historical era. /.../ This is a decisive moment. /.../
It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about
more even than the future of the Middle East and the
war on terror. It is about what sort of role the
United States intends to play in the twenty-first
century." One cannot but agree with it: it is
effectively the future of international community
which is at stake now - the new rules which will
regulate it, what the new world order will be. What is
going on now is the next logical step of the US
dismissal of the Hague court.
The first permanent global war crimes court started to
work on July 1, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to
tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and war
crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary
citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution for human
rights violations, including systematic murder,
torture, rape and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan
put it: "There must be a recognition that we are all
members of one human family. We have to create new
institutions. This is one of them. This is another
step forward in humanity's slow march toward
civilization." However, while human rights groups have
hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone
for international justice since top Nazis were tried
by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg
after World War Two, the court faces stiff opposition
from the United States, Russia and China. The United
States says the court would infringe on national
sovereignty and could lead to politically motivated
prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working
outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even
weighing legislation authorizing U.S. forces to invade
The Hague where the court will be based, in the event
prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy
paradox here is that the US thus rejected the
jurisdiction of a tribunal which was constituted with
the full support (and votes) of the US themselves!
Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the
Hague, not be given the right to claim that, since the
US reject the legality of the international
jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal, the same
argumentation should hold also for him? And the same
goes for Croatia: the US are now exerting tremendous
pressure onto the Croat government to deliver to the
Hague court a couple of its generals accused of war
crimes during the struggles in Bosnia - the reaction
is, of course, how can they ask this of US when THEY
do not recognize the legitimacy of the Hague court? Or
are the US citizens effectively "more equal than
others"? If one simply universalizes the underlying
principles of the Bush-doctrine, does India not have a
full right to attack Pakistan? It does directly
support and harbor anti-Indian terror in Kashmir, and
it possesses (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction.
Not to mention the right of China to attack Taiwan,
and so on, with unpredictable consequences...
Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "silent
revolution," in the course of which the unwritten
rules which determine the most elementary
international logic are changing? The US scold
Gerhardt Schroeder, a democratically elected leader,
for maintaining a stance supported by a large majority
of the population, plus, according to the polls in the
mid-February, around 59% of the US population itself
(who oppose strike against Iraq without the UN
support). In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94%
of the people are opposed to allowing the US troops'
presence for the war against Iraq - where is democracy
here? Every old Leftist remembers Marx's reply, in The
Communist Manifesto, to the critics who reproached the
Communists that they aim at undermining family,
property, etc.: it is the capitalist order itself
whose economic dynamics is destroying the traditional
family order (incidentally, a fact more true today
than in Marx's time), as well as expropriating the
large majority of the population. In the same vein, is
it not that precisely those who pose today as global
defenders of democracy are effectively undermining it?
In a perverse rhetorical twist, when the pro-war
leaders are confronted with the brutal fact that their
politics is out of tune with the majority of their
population, they take recourse to the commonplace
wisdom that "a true leader leads, he does not follow"
- and this from leaders otherwise obsessed with
opinion polls...
The true dangers are the long-term ones. In what
resides perhaps the greatest danger of the prospect of
the American occupation of Iraq? The present regime in
Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one, out of
touch with the Muslim fundamentalist populism - it is
obvious that Saddam only superficially flirts with the
pan-Arab Muslim sentiment. As his past clearly
demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving for
power, and shifting alliances when it fits his
purposes - first against Iran to grab their oil
fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason,
bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied
to the US - what Saddam is not is a fundamentalist
obsessed with the "big Satan," ready to blow the world
apart just to get him. However, what can emerge as the
result of the US occupation is precisely a truly
fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly
linked to such movements in other Arab countries or
countries with Muslim presence.
One can surmise that the US are well aware that the
era of Saddam and his non-fundamentalist regime is
coming to an end in Iraq, and that the attack on Iraq
is probably conceived as a much more radical
preemptive strike - not against Saddam, but against
the main contender for Saddam's political successor, a
truly fundamentalist Islamic regime. Yes in this way,
the vicious cycle of the American intervention gets
only more complex: the danger is that the very
American intervention will contribute to the emergence
of what America most fears, a large united
anti-American Muslim front. It is the first case of
the direct American occupation of a large and key Arab
country - how could this not generate universal hatred
in reaction? One can already imagine thousands of
young people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and
how that will force the US government to impose a
permanent high alert emergency state... However, at
this point, one cannot resist a slightly paranoid
temptation: what if the people around Bush KNOW this,
what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of
the entire operation? What if the TRUE target of the
"war on terror" is the American society itself, i.e.,
the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?
On March 5 2003, on "Buchanan & Press" news show on
NBC, they showed on the TV screen the photo of the
recently captured Khalid Shakh Mohammed, the "third
man of al-Qaeda" - a mean face with moustaches, in an
unspecified nightgown prison-dress, half opened and
with something like bruises half-discernible (hints
that he was already tortured?) -, while Pat Buchanan's
fast voice was asking: "Should this man who knows all
the names all the detailed plans for the future
terrorist attacks on the US, be tortured, so that we
get all this out of him?" The horror of it was that
the photo, with its details, already suggested the
answer - no wonder the response of other commentators
and viewers' calls was an overwhelming "Yes!" - which
makes one nostalgic of the good old days of the
colonial war in Algeria when the torture practiced by
the French Army was a dirty secret... Effectively, was
this not a pretty close realization of what Orwell
imagined in 1984, in his vision of "hate sessions,"
where the citizens are shown photos of the traitors
and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story
goes on: a day later, on another Fox TV show, a
commentator claimed that one is allowed to do with
this prisoner whatever, not only deprive him of sleep,
but break his fingers, etc.etc., because he is "a
piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever."
THIS is the true catastrophe: that such public
statements are today possible.
We should therefore be very attentive not to fight
false battles: the debates on how bad Saddam is, even
on how much the war will cost, etc., are false
debates. The focus should be on what effectively goes
on in our societies, on what kind of society is
emerging HERE as the result of the "war on terror."
Instead of talking about hidden conspirative agendas,
one should shift the focus onto what is going on, onto
what kind of changes are taking place here and now.
The ultimate result of the war will be a change in OUR
political order.
The true danger can be best exemplified by the actual
role of the populist Right in Europe: to introduce
certain topics (the foreign threat, the necessity to
limit immigration, etc.) which were then silently
taken over not only by the conservative parties, but
even by the de facto politics of the "Socialist"
governments. Today, the need to "regulate" the status
of immigrants, etc., is part of the mainstream
consensus: as the story goes, le Pen did address and
exploit real problems which bother people. One is
almost tempted to say that, if there were no le Pen in
France, he should have been invented: he is a perfect
person whom one loves to hate, the hatred for whom
guarantees the wide liberal "democratic pact," the
pathetic identification with democratic values of
tolerance and respect for diversity - however, after
shouting "Horrible! How dark and uncivilized! Wholly
unacceptable! A threat to our basic democratic
values!", the outraged liberals proceed to act like
"le Pen with a human face," to do the same thing in a
more "civilized" way, along the lines of "But the
racist populists are manipulating legitimate worries
of ordinary people, so we do have to take some
measures!"...
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation
of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right
disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice
to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the
"foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent"
democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically
rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message
in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of
background "unwritten rules" has already changed so
much that no one even notices it and everyone is just
relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And
the true danger is that something similar will happen
with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John
Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will
remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible
ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be
their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed,
since their message will be incorporated into the
mainstream.