Weapons of Mass Deception and What We Don't Know About U.S. Policy in the Middle East

• Author: Irene Gendzier
• Position: Professor, Department of Political Science, Boston University
• Pages: 49-82

Weapons of Mass Deception and What We Don’t Know

About U.S. Policy in the Middle East

Irene Gendzier

∗

I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 49

II. KEEPING THE PUBLIC UNINFORMED ................................................ 51

III. RESISTANCE TO IGNORANCE AND INDIFFERENCE............................. 57

A. Fallujah ....................................................................................... 58

B. Congressional Hearings ............................................................. 62

IV. THE LAST TABOO? THE ISRAEL–PALESTINE CONFLICT ................... 65

V. ISRAELIS AND PALEST INIANS: REFLECTIONS ON FENCES AND

NEW INITIATIVES ............................................................................ 72

VI. CON CLUSION ..................................................................................... 81

I. INTRODUCTION

How can one make sense of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a r egion

viewed as hopelessly marred by un stable, if not intractable politics which

have not been entirely reformed by the revolutionary developments of the

past year? The question assumes special importance given the primacy of the

Middle East in U.S. foreign polic y, and notably its policy of counter-terrorism

in the wake of 9/11.

The discussion that follows assumes that “rethinking Israel–Palestine

policy” is inseparable from a reconsideratio n of U.S. Middle East policy,

including that pursued in Iraq and justified in the name of counter-terrorism.

It assumes that such “rethinking” of policy requires subjecting its official

formulation, justification and public dissemin ation to critical examination.

The results, as the pages that follow reveal, expose the weapons of mass

deception designed to assure passive public support, irrespective of the

nature of policies pursued.

There is little comfort in acknowledgin g that this practice is not unique to

the United States, or to the pursuit of Middle East policy in the United

States, as those familiar with the history o f U.S. policy in Southeast Asia and

Latin America can attest. Bu t it remains that we have y et to confront the

* Professor, Department of Political Science, Boston University. Professor Gendzier is the author

of among other works, Notes From the Minefield, United States Intervention in Lebanon and the

Middle East, 1945–1958 (1997, 2006); co-editor, with Richard Falk and Robert J. Lifton, of

Crimes of War, Iraq, (Nation Books, 2006); and author of the forthcoming, Dying to Forget: the

Foundation of United States Policy in the Middle East, 1945–1949, Oil, Palestine and Israel

(Columbia Univ. Press).

TRANSNATIONAL LAW & CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 21:49

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consequences of deception and its widespread dissemination for our

understanding of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and U.S. po licy in the

Middle East.

In the winter of 2011, as reporters were confronting the early stages of

the “Arab Spring,” New York Times r eporter Frank Rich adm itted that it is

not only the Administration that is “scram bling,” so are its constituents.1

“After a near-decade of fighting wars in the Arab world, we can still barely

distinguish Sunni from Shia.”2 Is the fact that Americans can barely

distinguish Sunni from Shia the most reve aling distinguishing mark to make

sense of developments in the Arab world, or is it the one readers found most

familiar? If so, why? The reflexive classification of Arab politics in ter ms of

sectarian differences has long been a common p ractice in media coverage and

public talk of the Middle East, a region that until recently was viewed in th e

United States as congenitally unfit for democracy and civil society. The

revolutionary transformations that have been ongoing in Tunisia and Egypt

and the dynamic movements affecting the region from North Africa and the

Middle East since the early spring o f 2011, exposed the severe limits of such

reductive classifications.

As Rich wrote in his column on the public response to the developments

in the Middle East, they reflected an avid desire to know and understand, but

journalists were hampered by:

the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and

at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large

swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely

to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s

events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at

the demonstrators’ lives.3

Rich blamed media control, as in the case of Comcast, DirecTV and Time

Warner, for blocking al-Jazeera English, a majo r source of information on

ongoing developments across the Arab world.4 He also pointed to the

“indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America—and of the low quotient of

comprehensive adult news coverage” as contributing to such Islamophobia.5

Rich further observed that “given the disconnect between America and the

Arab world, it’s no wonder that American s are invested in the fights for

freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve

1 Frank Rich, Wallflowers at th e Revolution, N .Y. TIMES, Feb. 6, 2011,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06rich.html.

2 Id.; see also Jeff Stein, Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 17, 2009,

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/opinion/17stein.html.

3 Rich, supra note 1.

4 Id.

5 Id.

Spring 2012] WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION

51

been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a

jihadist.”6

In order to see what was happening in Egypt one must assume a different

conceptual framework, one that does not attempt to explain developments in

the Arab world in terms of sects and ethnic divisions. This type of conceptual

analysis involves being able to recognize the socioe conomic and political

grievances that mobilized Egyptians to demand an end to the authoritarian

Mubarak regime, long viewed in Washington as a n example of moderation,

stability, and realism—an allusion to it s pro-Western orientation and its

relations with Israel. With the breakdown of the mod el and its leader, the

symbol of Tahrir Square came to symbolize anothe r struggle, one for equality,

political representation, and social justice. Americans empathized with this

struggle, and, in some instances, identified with it, as exemplified by the

solidarity expressed by workers in Wisconsin who denounced Governor

Walker as “Hosni Walker” for h is attack on workers’ rights, and in the letter

of advice to President Obama from former House and Senate leader, George

McGovern.7

Such signs, however, hardly invalidate Frank Rich’s remarks about how

little Americans know of their government’ s policies in the Middle East,

including Iraq and the U.S. invasion of that country. “It took months, even

years, for us to learn the hard w ay that in truth we really had no idea of what

was going on.”8

II. KEEPING THE PUBLIC UNINFORMED

The title of this essay refers to weapons of mass deception and their

function in the justification of U.S. policy in the Middle East, including Iraq

and the Israel–Palestine conflict. It is part of an inquiry that aims to explore

and expose what we know and why, or more precisely, what we do not know

and do not question of policies ostensibly carried out in our name. Underlying

such an inquiry is the conviction that the public has the right to know, as

House and Senate representatives, who investigated the U.S. export of

weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein in the years before the U.S.

invasion of 2003, insisted. It is the same conviction that animate d others

whose testimony against the abuse of state power reflected their conviction

that arousing public consciousness is the first step in changing policy.

Weapons of mass deception depend on ignorance of past policy, including

relations of power and profit embedded in its contemporary expression. They

rely on the education to conformist thinking to justify a distancing from the

6 Id.

7 Mike Hall, Huge Protest Greets ‘Hosni Walker’s’ Attack on Wisconsin Workers, AFL-CIO NOW

BLOG (Fe b. 16, 2011), http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/02/16/huge-protest-greets-hosni-walkers-attack-

on-wisconsin-workers/; George McGovern, Easy Chair, A Letter to Barack Obama, HARPER’S

MAG., Sep. 2011, at 10, 12.

8 Rich, supra note 1.