Can the mystery of evil, an age-old metaphysical dilemma of the human condition, be solved by a Texan with limited academic credentials? To hear him tell it, George W. Bush thinks so.
In Bucharest last week, speaking before a large crowd of Romanians, as he extended their country an invitation to join NATO, he said: "You value freedom, because you have lived without it. You know the difference between good and evil, because you have seen the face of evil."
Harking back to one of his trinity of bete noires that make up "the axis of evil" in the world today, Bush added: "An aggressive dictator now rules in Iraq. By his search of weapons of mass destruction, by his ties to terrorist groups, the dictator of Iraq threatens the security of every free nation, including the free nations of Europe."
Working the crowd like the true politician that he is, he continued: "We must be willing to stand in the face of evil, to have the courage to always face danger. The people of the Baltic states have shown these qualities to the world. You have known cruel oppression and withstood it. You were held captive by an empire and you outlived it." (Ronald Reagan, were he "with us" today, would be upset at the omission of the term evil in the reference to the Soviet empire.)
I have a problem with President Bush’s rhetoric, not only because of its austere, dry detachment, its ascending rhythm of almost Latinate tone, and the arrogance of disenchanted hauteur that one associates with the leader of a Big Power, but because of its disingenuous, facile craftiness.
Evil is any act that inflicts disaster, misfortune or pain on a human community. So consider in this regard the unspeakable evil that the US, by manipulating the UN Security Council since 1991, has visited on the people of Iraq through the use of economic sanctions — economic sanctions that in this case have been used as a weapon of mass destruction, a legitimized act of slaughter where an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died as a direct consequence, almost three times as many as the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic attacks.
These fatalities have been well-documented, though underreported in the media.
How could such a toll, one wonders, have been glossed over, even justified, for so long?
"As an academic who studies the ethics of international relations, I was curious," writes Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University, in the current issue of the influential and highly respected Harper’s magazine. "It was easy to discover that for the last ten years a vast number of holdups had been placed on billions of dollars worth of what seemed unobejectionable — and very much needed — imports to Iraq. But I soon learned that all UN records that could answer my questions were kept from public scrutiny Working tirelessly over the last three years, Gordon was able to acquire many of these key confidential documents.
She obtained them, she says, "on the condition that my sources remain anonymous."
What these documents showed was that the US has fought aggressively throughout the last decade to "purposefully" minimize the humanitarian goods that entered the country and has done so "in the face of enormous human suffering, including massive increases in child mortality and widespread epidemics."
Take what in effect are Washington’s fiats inside the UN to block the purchase by Baghdad of materials necessary to generate electricity, or equipment for radio, telephone and other communications. At one time, according to Gordon’s research, Iraq was allowed to purchase a sewage-treatment system but was blocked from buying the generator necessary to run it. The end result? The country has been pouring 300,000 tons of raw sewage daily into its rivers.
Among the many deprivations that Iraqis have suffered, none has been more terrible than the damage to their water system, which dramatically reduced their access to potable water. Again, the end result? Devastation wrought on a whole community.
By 1996, for example, with all sewage plants having broken down, there were widespread outbreaks of cholera, massive increases in child dysentery and skyrocketing infant mortality. (According to UN figures, in the late 1980s the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five was about fifty per 1000. By 1994 it almost doubled, to 93. And by 1999, it increased to 130 — that is, 13 percent of Iraqi children were dead before their fifth birthday.)
"For the most part," wrote Gordon, "they died as a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."
You want to contemplate the face of evil, consider what a senior Pentagon planning officer had to say about the sanctions to a Washington Post reporter in June 23, 1991. The man is quoted as saying that Iraq’s electrical grids had been targeted at the time by bombing strikes precisely in order to undermine the civilian economy.
"People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage,’" he declaimed. "Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."
That, dear reader, is evil.
When, in 1979, millions of Iranians daily marched down the streets of their capital hollering, "Death to America," and identifying the US as "The Big Satan," ordinary Americans, often decent folk who would not ordinarily sanction cruelty of any kind, inflicted on any people, for any reason, but nevertheless decent folk who traditionally evince no interest in foreign affairs, were genuinely surprised by that expression of hostility.
They asked, but Gosh, why do these folks hate us so much?
These Americans had not read, or been informed by the media, about their government’s machinations, its acts of evil, if you wish, in that proud country since the early 1950s.
The United States, but more accurately the US government, has generated enduring bitterness against it by peoples all the way from Chile to Palestine, and a lot of other countries in between. (Chile and Palestine in particular, you will agree, are justified to hold special grudges against Washington.)
When degradation is wantonly visited upon a people, its instigations carry over into the language, the culture, and the archetype. They are never wholly or rapidly dispersed. Rather, they insinuate themselves into the marrow of a people’s consciousness.
The bard was right. The evil that men do lives after them.
Arab News opinion article 28 November 2002
