The Real Case for War
By: Dr. Joseph Hitti
New England Americans for Lebanon Boston
16 February 2003

I just finished reading "The Case Against a US War on Iraq" by Robert Fisk of the Independent, and I am incensed by the hypocrisy of this witness to the Syrian regime's butchery of 20,000 of its own citizens of the city of Hama in 1981.

I stand with Kanaan Makkyiah, the exiled Iraqi academic, and say on behalf on millions of ordinary Arabs that we want the war because it is the only offer we have on the table today.  We need to get us out of decades of oppression, massacres, secret police, kidnapping and disappearances, corruption and theft, collusion between rulers, the clergy, and the business and political elites that run the Arab world today. Anything has become better than my generation's 50 years of mayhem, abuse, repression, stunted development, cronyism, intimidation, torture, kidnapping, disappearances, 99.99% elections, public stonings and beheadings. Anything. Bombs falling from the skies of an American jet fighter, coupled with the hope for freedom and democracy, are better.  War is like manna compared to growing up in a country where the Mukhabaraat come knocking in the dead of night to take your father away for good, when you have no running water, where electricity is rationed, where you are told to hate Westerners yet have to serve the eco-tourists who come flocking in your streets with their dollars and euros seeking to romanticize your own misery, and where being anything but a Sunni Arab Muslim consecrates you to the status of second and third class citizenship.

I call on Mr. Fisk's "New Europe" to offer an alternative to the war. It is not enough to say we are against war. We need serious proposals to end the misery, to stem the flow of refugees begging at the doors of your embassies. If the New Europe is against war, then what is it for? What does it have to offer instead to eliminate the dictatorships that have been sending millions of their desperate people begging to enter Europe's gates and shores? Why do the people of North Africa and the Middle East line up at foreign embassies for visas? Why do they throw themselves in the back of trucks and in the bellies of boats for dangerous crossings to make it to America and Europe? What does the New Europe have to offer to stem the tide of despair? Haven't the Europeans asked themselves why they have millions of Kurdish, Turkish, Arab, and North African immigrants still knocking at their doors sixty years after the end of colonialism?

The New Europe is still very old. It is still infused with the same orientalist condescension of its past. It continues to romanticize the Middle East and the Third World for its misery and anachronisms. It perpetuates its own superiority by unknowingly denying the native Arabs any interest in change and development, and therefore any responsibility to be agents of such a change. We do not need pity. Our causes are not hobbies for otherwise bored bourgeois nouveau eco-tourists of New York, Berlin, and Paris. Our thirst for freedom is the same as yours. We want it unadulterated, absolute, and we want to win it by war and bloody revolutions, like you did when you deposed your monarchs and separated your church from your state. It took you several bloody millennia to create the democracies you have today. Why are you denying us the same opportunity?

The New Europe is exactly like the America it is criticizing. It says it does not want war, not because of the dark eyes of our children, but for the same dark oil that sits beneath our sands. Chirac and Shroeder seek the same oil company deals that the Americans are vying for in Iraq. The New Europe does not have the moral high ground over America. It is as insidious and as hypocritical as Bush's oil henchmen. It has proven itself to be as capable of making deals with dictatorships and oligarchs as has America. The New Europe says it is against war because it simply cannot wage that war. So far we have seen Blair kiss the hands of Bashar Assad, the new and improved aspiring butcher of Damascus. We have seen Jacques Chirac schmoozing to the Saudis and their puppets in Syria and Lebanon. These New Europeans are after the same oil that Bush is after. They want the deals for their oil companies, not for American companies. They want to run the Middle East, and they can't stand the idea of the Americans doing it. They want to make backroom deals with the younger crop of Arab dictators. The New Europe has no more sympathy for the Arabs than Bush. The New Europe is a clone of Bush's America.

To the anti-war eco-tourists, I say read Nizar Kabbani's "The Poem of Balqis" to hear the cries of pain and despair of the Arab people. Mr. Kabbani escaped from the Syrian Gulag to Beirut back when Beirut was still a warm place. The Syrian regime followed him and killed his Iraqi wife Balqis in 1981 when they bombed the Iraqi embassy in Beirut. That same year, they melted the right hand of journalist Salim El-Laouzi in acid and dumped his body in the ditch to teach the people a lesson about their brand of freedom of speech. No, Mr. Fisk, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the main issue in the Arab world. The main issue in the Arab world is what Arab rulers have done to their people.

As Kanaan Makkyiah, the Iraqi academic in exile in the US has said, no one has asked the peoples of the Arab world what they want. The West is bickering about whether it is a war for oil or a war of weapons of mass destruction. No one is asking the people of Iraq what they want. It is wrong to assume that the Iraqi people reject war with the same mindset as the eco-tourists of the West.  For the eco-tourists lounging in their neat downtown offices dreaming of escaping to the desert or the beach, war is such a remote and absurd notion. But for the Arab children and the mothers whose fathers and husbands have disappeared, and who live daily in the sewers and the uncollected garbage of the shanty towns of Cairo and Beirut, war suddenly seems like a possibility out of the misery.

The greatest crime of the anti-war movement is that it has no solution for the poor and the dispossessed, for the lack of democracy, for the corruption of the business political and religious elites who rule the Arab world today. They have no solution but to keep us chained by centuries of antiquated governance, by traditions that hamper the development of our men, women and children. They insult us by assuming that we love our dusty streets, our open sewers, our rationed electricity, our poisoned waters, and our unemployment. They insult us by assuming we love the sons of our dictators who inherit their fathers' thrones, themselves created over the blood and ashes of older monarchies. They hurt us when they think we love our jailers and our torturers, our thought police, the acid-melted hands of our journalists and writers, our 99.99% elections, our having to bend and kiss the hands and the rings of the clergymen who rule in collusion with the politico-businessmen who own the country, the Mukhabaraat secret services, the long lines at foreign embassies for desperate visas out of the Gulag. They make our misery even more desperate when they deny us the right to see our liberation through war, just like theirs.

They insult us when they don't listen to us when we say we want war because it is our only hope.  We have no alternatives. We have been living for decades under the Saddams, the Assads, the Mubaraks, and the Sauds... We are talked down by the New Europeans into thinking that the alternatives to these despots are anarchy and chaos. But the anarchy and chaos is what they, the bleeding hearted eco-tourists, are afraid of, not us. We are not afraid of the anarchy and chaos, we are not afraid of war, we are not worried about a few more "martyrs' for the right cause this time around, because our daily lives are so much worse than any of these scenarios and the mere possibility of a way out is such a balm to our pain. To be liberated from the Gulag is our dream and the hope for our children.   We are willing to pay the price to end another fifty years of Husseins, Assads, Mubaraks, Qaddafis, and Arafats.  Another fifty years of their sons killing us, suffocating us down to every little drop of our morning coffee cups, of life in fear, of exile, of not being able to act or think without feeding the men of the dictator-ruler, of chopped-off arms and beheadings in downtown Riyadh, of the torture rooms in the jails of Beirut and Damascus and Baghdad where our thinkers, our poets, our writers, our scientists and our human right activists are wasting their lives.

What does the New Europe have to offer the Arab world and the Iraqi people instead of a war of liberation?  How long do we have to wait to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein if not by war? We, the people of the Middle East, are tired of being "petted" by the pro- and anti- war movements of the West. We are tired of being attacked or defended for who we are and what we want to do with our lives. We are tired of the orientalists, the new age romantics, the clueless peaceniks, and the SUV-driving eco-tourists demonstrating against the war. We are equally tired of the rednecks, backwoods conservatives, right-wing supremacists and other Western crazies of God yelling equally cluelessly for war.

Listen up, all of you orientalists, eco-tourists, bored middle-class weekend warriors, new age vegetarians, residual sixties peaceniks, and otherwise unclassifiable make-love-not-war friends walking in the streets of Paris, New York, and Berlin. We, the people of the Arab world, want war because it is the only solution on the table right now. It is the only hope we have right now to end decades of misery, to reset the clock for a new generation of Arabs who can grow up without hatred, because only then can we hope for self-sustained, self-driven growth and development within the same framework and principles that govern human societies in our time: Freedom, justice, peace, diversity, democracy, human rights, tolerance, openness, and the acceptance of the "other". We don't want your pity. We don't want your sympathy. We don't want your food. We don't want your dollars. We don't want your peace quilts. We want these things: Freedom, justice, peace, diversity, democracy, human rights, tolerance, openness, and the acceptance of the "other". You have these things. We don't.  Your parents' and grandparents' generations won these things by war and revolution. We want these things, and we will fight the wars and the revolutions that we need to fight to win them. Just like you. We have been wanting them for generations, but you never helped us. Instead you preferred to keep us "stabilized" by colluding with our rulers so you protect your so-called national interests and your oil. We want these things in any way we can get them. We are tired of watching you on TV enjoying them, while we wonder why we don't have them. We want them fast. We want them now. By force of by peace. For our friends and foes alike. It does not matter if it is Bush, Chirac, Blair or Shroeder, or John-Paul II, Mandela or Ghandi, or Arafat or Sharon who helps us get them.

President Bush, they say your war is a war for oil. It may be so. After decades of your national interests conflicting with those of the people of the Arab world, they are for once convergent with them. They say you are not fighting for democracy. But if your war for oil gives the peoples of the Arab world a chance to fight for democracy and imagine a better future, then by all means fight this war.