A Weblog Post

My total absence in the blogosphere leads me to a tepid reentry via a piece that I had written, though not developed, for a class of mine. With little further ado, here's a bit of my Defense of Edward Said against all the haters at ALDaily. I've been trying to avoid posting some blah blah theory stuff, but I think that the recent defense of our fine education by AT-5k has emboldened me; I would hope professor Balot might have enjoyed this.

A good deal of the criticism of Said’s Orientalism as address the work’s seeming ahistoricisms and tendency to assign importance to only certain works and events while ignoring others. At times, this seems fair, and Said often displays a large degree of ambivalence to Marxism and similar (historical) materialist strategies. However, it would seem that Said’s major concern was not to renounce the applicability of Marxism, but merely to avoid certain strands of reductionism or orthodoxy sometimes found in Marxist analysis. Instead he sought—as, I believe, Foucault did also—to situate a materialist critique alongside a critique of the ideology of Orientalism. As such, his focus on literary texts, colonial documents, and other representations of the East was not intended to replace the historical and material factors involved in the interrelation between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West.’ He did not seek to, as Sadiq al-‘Azm implies in one critique (in an article otherwise in agreement with Said entitled “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse”), to imply that because all discourse is filtered through representation then the west is innocently acting in the only way it can. That the apprehension of a culture proceeds through the creation of representations does not entail resignation. Instead, as Said’s (rhetorical) questions at the end of his book imply, the fundamental problem is with the very questions asked and with the attempts to take an entire “culture” as a unit of analysis (325-326).

Said’s focus on the micro-politics of the Orientalist discourse, the small and seemingly insignificant sites of its operation, is not merely an type of eclecticism or corralling data to support his point. By focusing on the details that he does, Said exposes the conditions of the Occidental relationship with the Orient in a way that cuts through both Orientalist discourse but also historicist and even materialist analyses. Genealogy gives a means to analyze the history of truth, so to speak; it attempts to expose the conditions under which interpretations and analyses can be made. When thinking about the way Said writes the genealogy of Orientalism and his critics, I am reminded Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it….

Benjamin attempts throughout the same essay to differentiate between the ‘empty’ time of the historicist and the historical materialist’s “time of the now.” Said’s work I see as embodying the process of the latter; the history of Orientalism is not homogenous, and it is only by detailing the small fragments of the past that the importance of Orientalism in the present can be felt. In fact, the full connection between Orientalism and Imperialism, which many leftist scholars accuse Said of treating too lightly, can only be grasped in the present, not as they have been part of a long causal chain but as a myriad of fragments that are now condensed. Thus the ultimate goal is not to attempt to create a new causality or history that somehow distances itself from Orientalism, or seek to form new representations for the future. The militant or provocative kernel of Said’s work instead provokes us to dismantle or implode this historicism; materialism, seemingly absent in Said’s work, returns in the final instance, as it is only in the present that the full stakes of the struggle can be felt. The struggle is imminently a materialist one because it is only a materialist perspective that can allow the historian or thinker to analyze each individual situation as such, as a distinct set of conditions that does not seek recourse in the inconsistencies of Orientalism.

Benny Morris and the "determination" to pre-emptively kill millions of Iranians

Israeli historian Benny Morris paints a deeply disturbing picture of what an Iranian nuclear strike against Israel could look like. Morris is of course right that we need to take Iran's threat to world peace seriously, but it is absurd to think that this is not being done already. Morris, however, seems to believe that the "incompetent leadership in Jerusalem" will ultimately "prove unequal to the task" (which task, exactly?), and that the United States will not act, having been "driven by the debacle in Iraq into a deep isolationism" (all this, when we now know that the U.S. encouraged Israel to expand the Lebanese war to Syria, and that the government has contingency plans for a large-scale war against Iran).

In fact, I find the majority of Morris's article either misleading, mistaken, or both. For example, Morris repeats what I believe to be a serious error: the idea that Ahmadinejad is so "obsessed" that he will forsake the existence of Iran itself in order to destroy Israel.

He is willing to gamble -- the future of Iran or even of the whole Muslim Middle East in exchange for Israel's destruction. No doubt he believes that Allah, somehow, will protect Iran from an Israeli nuclear response or an American counterstrike. [...] Or he may well take into account a counter-strike and simply, irrationally (to our way of thinking), be willing to pay the price. As his mentor, Khomeini, put it in a speech in Qom in 1980: 'We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. I say, let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant.' For these worshipers at the cult of death, even the sacrifice of the homeland is acceptable if the outcome is the demise of Israel.

To me this all smacks of the erroneous judgments (stemming from an article by Bernard Lewis) which predicted that Iran was planning to destroy Israel (with what bombs?) on August 22 of last year. Like Morris, Lewis argued that Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah possess an "apocalyptic worldview" which ensures that they will not follow the rules of Mutually Assured Destruction "rationally." Although argument from precedent will only take you so far, I can think of no case in which a nation-state effectively destroyed itself in order to carry out a "holy" or otherwise irrational mission. The attribution of such irrationality to Ahmadinejad has always appeared to me a smokescreen for stifling debate on Iran's real objectives and encouraging immediate military action.

Furthermore, Morris takes the offensive step of ascribing to "Western intellectuals and media outlets" the "preparation of hearts and minds" for the second Holocaust. Apparently, both the vilest sorts of anti-Semites and Western critics of Israeli policy have been desensitizing all of us to the idea of nuclear annihilation.

As with the first, the second Holocaust will have been preceded by decades of preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to different audiences -- but all have (objectively) served the same goal, the demonization of Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught: 'The Zionists\the Jews are the embodiment of evil' and 'Israel must be destroyed.' And Westerners, more subtly, were instructed: 'Israel is a racist oppressor state' and 'Israel, in this age of multi-culturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous'. Generations of Muslims and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these catechisms.

In addition to being the crudest sort of ad hominem attack and moral equivalizing (i.e. "any critic of Israel's policies is in actuality in league with anti-Semites"), this passage also implies that critics of oppressive governments automatically accept their destruction by nuclear weapons. For many millions of people opposed to the Iraq War, this sort of thinking obviously does not apply. I will give Morris the benefit of the doubt that some people who categorically oppose the Iraq war would not oppose the destruction of Israel (i.e. these loathsome hypocrites exist), but they are not even remotely close to being in the majority in the West. The general idea that Westerners would mumble "Oh, it's a shame about Israel, isn't it? But really, they had it coming, and they were superfluous" is a very serious distortion.

Finally, Morris describes a hypothetical situation in which the Israeli government is forced to use its nuclear arsenal against Iran:

In short order, therefore, the incompetent leadership in Jerusalem would soon confront a doomsday scenario, either after launching their marginally effective conventional offensive or in its stead, of launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Iranian nuclear program, some of whose components were in or near major cities. Would they have the stomach for this? Would their determination to save Israel extend to pre-emptively killing millions of Iranians and, in effect, destroying Iran?

I'm not going to deny for a second that Mutually Assured Destruction is a very real, very frightening concept, and that a nuclear-powered nation could one day find itself in the position of having to use its arsenal in the face of an impending attack. However, I take offense at the idea that a nuclear attack on innocent Iranians would be any less of an act of genocide. Is the difference that Iran would be attacking on the basis of sheer hatred, while an Israeli nuclear strike would be one of (preventive) defense? But Iran already has defensive excuses for the same sort of strike (while not saying so explicitly). Indeed, even before Iran's announcement of nuclear development the United States encouraged regime change in Tehran. Since the beginning of the nuclear program the outlining of possible attacks against Iran has only increased. Iran has indeed employed bellicose and threatening rhetoric, but everyone points to the fact that the completion of a nuclear weapon would take almost 10 years. To nuke a country now for an act which it is not even capable of achieving flies in the face of all sensibility, both pragmatic and moral. It's not that Israel is stuck in the position of not being able to use their nuclear weapons for fear of international outrage, as Morris says, but that they shouldn't do it.

The story as I've laid it out sounds particularly bleak if you believe that as soon as Iran acquires nuclear weapons (if they do), they will use them. In such a case I would then be an "appeaser," sitting on my hands until it's too late. However, I do not believe (uninformed as I am) that they will use them. You can scream that Ahmadinejad is irrational and suicidal until you're blue in the face, but I stand by my conviction that nation-state leaders will not sacrifice their existence for holy missions. That being said, it's not like I deny that Ahmadinejad and many others would like to see Israel destroyed if there could be no consequences involved. It's just that there are consequences, and Ahmadinejad understands them. Other things being equal, if Iran develops a nuclear weapon some series of demands and counter-demands will ensue, as was the case during the Cold War. This is by no means a welcome scenario, but it's better than the apocalyptic one.

However, there's no way of knowing right now whether this will happen. Just today, the Ayatollah showed signs of altering his policy because of international pressure, much to the chagrin of the Iranian President. I hope these developments continue and that cooler heads prevail. It's not set in stone that Iran will have nuclear weapons by 2015, nor does it have to be even likely. I've just noticed that Matt Yglesias has a similar, though much briefer, post on Iran here. Furthermore, the United States just can't just approach the brink of a nuclear strike on Iran while encouraging the "peaceful" nuclear program of Jordan, which recently announced its intention to start development. As I've said before, the world community is made up of states of both good and bad governments, but more than anything it is bound by rules. It's my (probably hopelessly naive) cosmopolitan hope that abiding by the rules will encourage such actions in others. Morris's article is either an expression of total pessimism or a tacit call for a "determined" nuclear strike. I don't see the need for either.