Air & Space Predators
Sunday July 12, 2009
Hellfire exhibit: The replica of a Predator drone, armed with the kind of Hellfire missiles that have devastating Pakistani civilian communities, on display at the Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (© Pierre Tristam)
It was a strange site. It shouldn't have been. The Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., exhibits all sorts of hardware, a lot of it military. Moral judgments are either subdued, subtle or nonexistent.
It was strange all the same to see the replica of a Predator drone, those pilotless reconnaissance air machines that have been raining Hellfire missiles on Pakistan and mostly killing civilians and turning Pakistanis against Americans, hanging innocently alongside other shock-and-awe inducing aircraft as tourists gaped, pointed or, more often, passed on indifferently: Most people still don't know what Predators are or what they do (or confuse them with NBC's lurid Dateline series of a similar name).
I was on vacation with the family this past week. We drove around the country for a couple of thousand miles, stopping at friends and family along the way, and doing what we usually do when we're near the capital: perform the American equivalent of the hajj. We didn't quite circle the National Mall seven times, but walked and greeted the requisite number of sites and monuments for most of a day, ending where most families with children usually go: the Air & Space, Mecca of entertaining museums.
Most of the exhibits are familiar even to people who've never been there. There's something iconic about things like the Apollo capsule, the Saturn rocket, the Montgolfier or Wright brothers' contraptions, or even in the odd B-29 Flying Fortress or its more supersonic and lethal descendants, that are embedded in the collective consciousness (for good or bad).
But the Predator?
It had to be a matter of time. What was curious about the small bit of information that went with the exhibit was its lack of context. No mention of the Predator's uses, which have been exclusively devoted to (to put it kindly) questionable assassinations and mad massacres in a so-far mostly empty search for "high-value" al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Hellfires have killed their share of leaders, but only the sort that get replaced before the embers turn black. The Juky 4 week, that most American, most Air-and-Space-like of weeks, featured at least three missile strikes on Pakistan by Predators, netting close to 100 dead. Pakistani authorities claim the strikes have dealt a severe blow to the Taliban and Qaeda leadership. But the claim is scratchy with the sound of a broken record.
I'm not saying the Predator replica shouldn't have been hanging there. Hiding from history is as bad as inventing it. But displaying it without context neutralizes its meaning, sanitizees its reality. The B-29 can be said to have contributed to ending the last world war. The Predator is the symbol of a pilotless war against invisible enemies in an endless war that appears no closer to ending today than it did when it began almost a decade ago. For all that, the Predator's replica at the Air & Space looks like just another triumph, a done deal ready for the usual snapshots or yawns on the way to the next wow.
If only it were so for the civilians at the receiving end of the Predator's offerings.
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Bahrain's Non-Visit to Israel
Sunday July 5, 2009
It's a good-news, bad-news sort of thing: On one hand, Bahraini government officials
touched down on Israeli soil for the first time in the history of Israel (since 1948). On the other, they did so only to retrieve five Bahraini citizens Israel took prisoner when it
captured a humanitarian ship and its 21 passengers and crew members who were on their way from Cyprus to deliver supplies to Gaza (where, as Sara Roy of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
notes, "96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs."
If the circumstances of the trip weren't bad enough, the Bahraini officials went out of their way to assure their people, and the world, that they did not, in fact, go through Israeli customs, therefore they did not really pass through Israel. They were there merely to retrieve their nationals. Not to enact a breakthrough in Bahraini-Israeli relations. This, even though Bahrain was enlightened enough to name a Jewish ambassador to the United States last year (Huda Noono).
The Gaza blockade is a shame and an outrage. No question. But it isn't the only blockade Arabs should be worried about. Their own blockade of Israel is equally a shame and an outrage. It has no purpose, no sense, not even a moral basis: if a blockade's intention is to change a situation, to force an issue, the Arab world's refusal to engage with Israel on any basis isn't doing the trick (anymore than Israel's imprisonment of Gaza is doing Israel, or the cause of peace, let alone human rights, any favors). To the contrary. It's institutionalizing prejudice and retarding improvements.
It's also creating absurd situations, like the Bahraini officials' non-visit to Israel on July 4. Another opportunity wasted.
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Saturday July 4, 2009
Mazel tov: The Statue of Liberty, lit up for the Moet & Chandon Fabulous Fete on Liberty Island in September 2006--another bubbly French American occasion centered on the statue, whose Egyptian origins often go unmentioned. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Moet & Chandon)
No, Miss Liberty of Statue-of-Liberty fame wasn’t always imagined as the scowling, linebacker-throated Midwestern matron of steely spiky Germanic stock that she is today. She was supposed to look like an Arab peasant, robed in the folds of Muslim precepts. She wasn’t even supposed to be eternally standing at the entrance of New York Harbor, warning new arrivals to the New World about New Jersey to her right. That’s all schoolbook revisionism designed not to traumatize young American pupils with the reality behind Liberty: that she was supposed to be the welcome ma’am at the entrance of the Suez Canal in Egypt, that her name was supposed to be either Egypt or Progress, and that the flame she was brandishing was to symbolize the light she was bringing to Asia, which had claims to newness all its own.
All this from the imaginative scruffles of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the Alsatian-French sculptor who’d fallen in love with his own Orientalist fantasies about the Middle East after a trip to Egypt’s Luxor spreads in 1855. He liked Egypt’s colossal sculptures, those “granite beings of imperturpable majesty” with their eyes seemingly “fixed on the limitless future.” He liked just as much the then-fashionable notions of Europeans thinking themselves the “Orient”’s best thing since unsliced baklava. Bartholdi returned to Egypt in 1869 with the blueprints for a toga-draped giant of a woman who’d double-up as a lighthouse at the entrance of the Suez Canal, which opened that year to fanfare and (British and French) stockholders’ delight.
The Suez Canal may have been in Egypt. But Egypt wasn’t reaping its monetary benefits. As Bartholdi was sketching one likeness of his great statue after another, it became apparent that his plan would never get Egypt’s financing. Bartholdi was crushed. He sailed to New York. And there, as his ship was entering New York Harbor, he saw Bedloe’s Island, deserted, oval-shaped, perfectly positioned to bear his creation. And there it was dedicated on Oct. 28, 1886, in sheets of rain and granite words from President Grover Cleveland.
Read the full story, "The Statue of Liberty's Egyptian Origins." And Happy Fourth.
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Saddam Hussein Unplugged
Friday July 3, 2009
Like hooded convicts: Fingerprints on Saddam Hussein's booking sheet (National Security Archives)
"Let me ask a direct question," Saddam Hussein said, in Arabic, at the beginning of one of his "interviews" by American interrogators in Baghdad on Feb. 13, 2004. "I want to ask where, from the beginning of this interview process until now, has the information been going? For our relationship to remain clear, I want to know." So Hussein was told: The U.S. government was doing the interviewing, and the information would likely lead back to George W. Bush.
Hussein seemed satisfied. Agreeable. Said he would have no reservations if others were "brought into" the process. He "does not mind" if the information is published. "If you decide to publish a book, be sure to write it in English as well as Arabic."
He spoke like his own publicist. He might as well have. He'll be the subject of his share of books, and in the next few days and weeks, more than his share of articles, now that the transcripts of 20 interviews and five "casual conversations" conducted with him after his capture by U.S. troops in December 2003 have been released, thanks to the always-industrious and fascinating National Security Archives at George Washington University.
"Saddam," the archives' own sum-up has it, "denied any connections to the 'zealot' Osama bin Laden, cited North Korea as his most likely ally in a crunch, and shared President George W. Bush's hostility towards the 'fanatic' Iranian mullahs, according to the FBI records of conversations from February through June 2004 between Saddam and Arabic-speaking agents in his detention cell at Baghdad International Airport."
It was for the Iranians' sake that he lied about possessing weapons of mass destruction. He feared them more than he feared the United States, so by pretending to have chemical weapons, he hoped to deter an Iranian attack.
From his last "casual conversation" with FBI agent George Piro, one of a scandalously small number of agents who spoke Arabic: "Hussein stated that he was a believer in God but was not a zealot." Hussein believed that religion and government should not mix."
Many of the interviews are searching, oral histories from Saddam Hussein's perspective of a range of matters--coups, the Palestinian-Israeli issue, wars with Israel, the Baath party in Iraq, his relationships with Syria and al-Qaeda--that will fill in his own perspective on Middle East history. But the documents are just as absorbing for the insights they allow about Saddam Hussein's mind at work, his personality, his strange mix of earnestness, clarity and delusions.
He was asked if, as often reported in the past, he had ever used doubles as security measures. "Movie magic," he called it, denying that he'd done so, except maybe when at war. But that's the thing: Iraq was in a virtual state of war for more years than not under Saddam.
"Not included in these FBI reports," the archives note, "are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds." That's too bad: no word, for instance, on the Reagan administration's strategic alliance with Saddam against Iran.
"This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic. One interview, #20, is redacted in its entirety on national security grounds, although it is not clear what issues agents could have discussed with Saddam that cannot now be disclosed to the public."
But we can guess. Ronald Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld and both Bushes must be breathing a sigh of relief, the redacting pen once again proving their questionable legacies' best friend.
Read the entire set of interviews and casual conversations at the National Security Archives.
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