Arab Like Us
Saddam and the Iraqis—the whole Arab world—are more American than we'd like to think...

Jonathan Hershfield, DMY Columnist, 4-24-03

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We desperately try to make ourselves feel better about this war. Nowhere is our latent guilt more obvious than in the major media. The way we do this the most is by pretending that the Iraqi people are somehow different from us in some general way. That they are not quite as worthy of life like Americans are. So although we want them to live free, it doesn't bother us to kill a few hundred of their civilians to make it so. Or a few thousand. We'll see.

But you only have to go to one other country in the world, and I'm including Canada, to see that all people on this planet are weird as hell. They all have psychological disorders of one kind or another, because, like us, they all have brains. Brains that are criminal, brains that are perverted, and brains that are brilliant and philanthropic. Killers and teachers, lovers and polluters.

We tend to hate them more when they remind us of ourselves. Many Arab leaders come from wealthy fundamentalist religious organizations, subtely different from ours only in their mythological doctrine. Many Arabs claim to take the Koran literally. Around a third of Americans take the Bible literally—word for word. Nearly half of us believe in the Devil and Hell—more than any other "industrialized" society in the world.

The Arabs often hold elections but leadership is predetermined. Ring any bells? Like us, they use capital punishment, executing minors and the mentally ill. They abuse and mutilate women while we persist in pressuring them to go under surgery to conform to state-sponsored images of femininity. They are plagued with racism, oppressing ethnic minorities who never chose to live within arbitrarily set boundaries. They use terrorist affiliates to carry out atrocities the governments can't commit in the open. Their dirt poor live in filth, practicing bad hygiene and crass rituals just like those less fortunate in our rural south or in urban ghettos.

But if we imagine the Iraqis to be totally different from us, we can free ourselves from this guilt. So when a bomb goes astray and demolishes some residential area, we don't need to empathize because it's not the same to them as it would be to us. If Iraq were invading us to overthrow the Bush regime because of all the suffering it induces in its worldly neighbors, that could obviously not be tolerated. But the Iraqis, since they're all different from us, should be quick to realize that the Americans are there to liberate them and that they'll be better off in the long run without Saddam. So if some civilian is complaining that he's lost all his possessions and his house and, hell, maybe a family member or two, we can't be so quick to judge the aggressors. Remember, this civilian lives in another civilization, not just another culture. Unlike what's happened to South and Central America, this part of the planet can only be improved by American influence.

American-style liberation is a funny thing. We impose a demon-like Saddam on the Iraqi people because he serves our interests. Then we sell him weapons and offer him financial aid during and after he uses these weapons on his so-called own people. Then he falls out of favor by threatening our interests in another territory (one that also lives under a brutal leadership). We punish him by imposing a poison-and-starvation campaign on the Iraqi people for twelve years. Finally, when it suits our interests, we remove Saddam Hussein and call it liberation. The Iraqis, being from a different "civilization", humbly thank us like one would graciously kiss the feet of a thug who's finally let up on a beating.

It would appear we aren't fascinated by those elements of Saddam's former cabinet that the so-called coalition is now working with—torturers and embezzlers, etc. that answered "yes" to the right questions. It seems they will be running this new Iraqi democracy. Again, one might expect abject visceral disgust with the cynicism the Bush administration is practicing—but when it comes to some bizarre other-worldly species, like Iraqis, we are merely "amused" in much the same way a child curiously looks at ants through a magnifying glass on a bright, sunny day.

But maybe we have to see the world in terms of "us" and "them". Otherwise, it would just be untidy.