Hopedance

I am going to start with a quotation that most of us are familiar with. It goes like this: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors but as liberators.” Guess who said that? It was not General Tommy Franks; it was not George Bush either. It was General Stanley Mott, a general in the British Army, which conquered Iraq in 1918.

After that conquest, 10,000 Iraqis died in three years in a national uprising against the British. As a historian, I see history repeated over and over. It is not repeated just because we make mistakes. It was not “only” a mistake when Donald Rumsfeld went to Iraq and supported Saddam at the time he was developing weapons of mass destruction. And what we see today are not just changing alliances — there is a system. What has happened in the Middle East in the past hundred years, even before the involvement of Americans, is the West trying to control the Middle East by force. First the British invaded and controlled the region for a long time.

And then the United States replaced British colonial power in the Middle East and followed the same policies. British and U.S. invasion of the Middle East is not the result of a mistake (supporting Saddam in the 1980s). This is the history of the Middle East. What United States has done in the Middle East is to create monsters when we need them. And when we don’t have any more use for them, we go in and take them out, but we forget that there are civilians who live there.

There have been hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners who have died in the past 50 years because of the monsters we have created, and then gone in to take out.

A good example was the Shah of Iran. There were billions of dollars worth of the most modern arms in his army. Iran was going to explode. Everybody knew that. In 1978, a few months before the Iranian Revolution, President Carter went to Iran and called it an “island of stability.” A few months later, the revolution overthrew the Shah, and those arms ended up in the hands of a group of clergy who were very anti- American. We had created that monstrous army. Now, we had to destroy it. That is the reason we supported Saddam in the 1980s, because he was fighting against the Iranian Army that we wanted to see destroyed. In that war, more than half-a-million people died on both sides. A high price for the Iranians and Iraqis to pay to correct American mistakes.

These days it is fashionable in the United States to say, “if you don’t support this war, you support Saddam.” That’s a lie, a big lie. I am Iranian. Saddam killed two of my cousins, the cousins I grew up with. He destroyed my neighborhood. If there is one person in this community who personally hates Saddam, it has to be me. But would I support bombing Iraqis and killing civilians to take out Saddam? No I wouldn’t.

Americans choose their government. There is a democracy here. Iraqis don’t have that choice. Iraqis are not responsible for what Saddam has done. The United States of America is responsible for it. We cannot keep killing civilians to correct our own political mistakes.

And it doesn’t end in Iraq.

Look at our friends in the Middle East today. Look at the ones we fought to liberate in 1991 in Kuwait. In that war, 200,000 Iraqis died, the price for the liberation of Kuwait. What is the government of Kuwait? One of the most repressive dictatorships in the region. There are no meaningful elections. Even in the kind of farce elections they have, women don’t have a right to vote. Look at our other friends in the Middle East.

According to the US government, we sent troops to Saudi Arabia in 1991 to make sure Saddam would not attack Saudis. What are the policies of Saudi Arabia? Mass arrests of the opposition, torture, summary executions. It’s even worse that Kuwait. In Saudi Arabia, not only women do not have the right to vote, nobody has the right to vote; women cannot even drive there. You can get arrested if you are a woman and try to drive in Saudi Arabia. We have been friends of the Saudis since the 1930s. Is this a mistake? After 70 years of supporting them, don’t we know what kind of government they have? So, please don’t tell me that nations make mistakes and then they change alliances to correct those mistakes [this is a response to one of the panelists declaring that “we all make mistakes,” making political policy as a matter of personal error]. No. The United States has kept changing alliances to follow the same policy it started 50 years ago in the Middle East: the policy that has created these monsters, who would act on our behalf to police the region. And then, when they get too powerful, we go in to take them out and, in this process, we create other monsters.

There is another monster we have been creating in the Middle East in the past 50 years, the government of Israel, a government with nuclear bombs, a repressive government torturing and killing people. Israel is our best friend in the Middle East. Where are our human values? How can we support regimes that are killing and torturing people? Just because it is useful to us? This is not the way America was built. This was not why Americans revolted against British colonialism. Americans fought to create freedom, to create democracy. Americans have a very good value system. Let’s not destroy it. Let’s appreciate it. Americans have a big heart. What is missing, where that heart is missing, has been historically in American governments.

Another point I want to make here is that, unfortunately, the American governments, just like any other government, just like Saddam’s government, just like the old Soviet government, just like European governments, do lie to their people to mobilize support for their policies. But it seems to me that the majority of Americans don’t question, even after they know they are lied to.

When are we as citizens going to start questioning spoonfed information from “embedded” journalists? Our media is not questioning it, and Americans keep buying it and supporting a policy which is not good for the Middle East and is not good for America. If you want safety in America, if you want to get rid of those terrorists, let’s get rid of the breeding ground of terrorism, which is hatred and anger. We didn’t have any terrorists in the Middle East against the United States 50 years ago. Why is it that so many Middle Easterners are now supportive of Al-Qaíida?

It is because of their experiences. It is because they have seen in their daily lives that their people have been killed or tortured, either by those dictators who have been supported by the United States or directly by U.S. bombs. If we want safety in our own country, let’s have safety for other people. Let’s accept the right of other people to live a life without interference from occupation.

Tonight I heard again and again that we are there for democracy, for getting rid of Saddam, that we are not there for oil. Just listen to this proposition: Look at what we have done in the past three years when it comes to oil. We occupied Afghanistan. There are countries around Afghanistan: Tajikestan, Uzbekistan,Turkmenistan. We now have military bases in all those countries around Afghanistan. Why? Because the oil in the Caspian Sea basin is one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

And now we are trying to build a pipeline to get the Caspian oil all the way through Afghanistan. We had a reason to go to Afghanistan, and it was not to bring democracy, and it was not to rebuild Afghanistan.

As a matter of fact, Bin Laden and his terrorists were another monster we created and then went in to take out. These are the same people we used to call the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, freedom fighters of Afghanistan. That is what President Reagan used to call them. We supported them, funded them, trained them against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These are the same people who turned against us and killed our people in New York. We went in to take out Bin Laden, and in the process killed a lot of civilians in Afghanistan, and Bin Laden is still running around somewhere.

The U.S. government is already signing contracts with U.S. companies, including the oil service company of which Dick Cheney had been CEO. So don’t tell me we are there to take out Saddam for democracy. We are there for oil, we are there to control the Middle East and, through the Middle Eastern resources, the whole world.