The Infinite Wisdom of Our Congress
By Michael S. Ladah
Our Congress has buckled under
electioneering by the President and the threat of the pro-war lobbies behind him. Our Congress, with its infinite wisdom, has
authorized the President to go to war to do more than what the President has told the
American people he would do in Iraq: eliminate Saddam Hussein, occupy Iraq and fully
humiliate the Iraqi People, the Arabs and the Moslem world.
Congress has apparently authorized the
President to go where no other president has gone before, to invade and occupy a country
in time of peace and in an area where there is no military conflict. Congress has not imposed limitations on the
President from taking us into a prolonged and perhaps endless quagmire that will cause us
to sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of the world’s mistrust of our policies. Congress has not imposed a limitation that this
would not be a cultural war, a first step against Moslem nations that disagree with our
objectives. And, Congress has not imposed any
limitations that would control the President’s actions to implement potential
imperialist objectives.
Without these limitations, which Congress
conveniently ignored, it is more certain now that the United States will be the new and
bigger bully in the Middle East. The
people of the Middle East are used to dealing with bullies, resisting colonial rule,
fighting exploitation of their natural wealth and fighting the expropriation of their land
by foreign invaders. For the last several
hundred years they lived under and resisted the rule of the Ottoman Empire and the
Colonial rule of the European powers, namely France and Britain.
The Arabs have tried and they detest
colonial rule and foreign occupation. They suffered the frustrating consequences of broken
promises given by the French and the British regarding Arab independence, and suffered the
disappointment and humiliation of a declaration by the British, the Balfour Declaration,
to give a homeland to the Jews in Palestine. At
a time when the relations between the Arabs and the colonial powers were adversary at
best, the United States of America was admired by the Arabs as a beacon of hope after the
First World War, for we were perceived as the only major power that did not have colonial
or imperialist designs on the Middle East. That was soon confirmed by the nature of the
entry of the U.S. oil industry into the Middle East. The oil concession agreement of the
1930s between Saudi Arabia and Standard Oil of California heralded a new era of relations
between an Arab country and a Western Power.
Since the end of the Second World War, so
much has gone wrong with the relations between the United States and the Arab and Moslem
world, most of it since the creation of Israel. The
relations have soured even more since 1967 because of our total support for the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Now, we
want to invade and occupy an Arab country and humiliate the entire Arab and Moslem world. Saddam Hussein may deserve the humiliation of
yet another defeat, but his people do not deserve the agony of war and the humiliation of
occupation.
If this, the war on Iraq, is perceived as
a war of cultures, similar to the Crusades, and it most likely will, then we should not be
surprised at what we may find the moment we start our attack on Iraq. Just as we followed the French in Southeast Asia
and did not learn from their mistakes, we are about to follow in the footsteps of the
British and the French in the Middle East. Once
more, we seem to have ignored the advice of the French.
I doubt that we should expect any less than they suffered at the hands of
the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa. I
do not believe that the American people and the U.S. Congress should look forward to this
new entanglement, nor do I believe that the wisdom of our Congress should be held hostage
to electioneering.
© 2002 by
Michael S. Ladah. The writer is an Arab American who lived and worked in various
parts of the Middle East. He is the author of “Quicksand, Oil and Dreams: The
Story of One of Five Million Dispossessed Palestinians.” He may be reached at
ladah@hotmail.com
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