Laila Lalami

It was only a matter of time…there is an online petition from folks who want to send the Statue of Liberty back to France.
Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.

“A generation ago the influence of Fanon’s typology of empire ensured that one could only be either very much for or very much against the great imperial structures that disappeared piece by piece after the Second World War; now, after years of degeneration following the white man’s departure, the empires that ruled Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far less tolerance for the disorder and tyranny that people like Nkrumah, Lumumba and Nasser instigated in the name of anti-colonialism. ”
Edward Said reviews Catherine Hall’s Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, for the London Review of Books.

Last night we came home from dinner just as CNN was reporting that a missile might have struck at Saddam’s bunker and they were waiting to see if it had been successful.

Of course, I was hooked.

I had grown resigned to the fact that we were at war now, but this was quite an extraordinary turn of events. If the U.S. could capture Saddam on Day 1, then of course it changed the way the war would develop and there likely wouldn’t be nearly as many deaths as we had all feared.

But it was too good to be true. So I decided to get out of the roller-coaster ride now before my emotions get too tangled up. I remember on September 11, I didn’t leave the sofa all day watching CNN, switching to ABC, checking the laptop, etc. And I don’t want a repeat of that emotionally draining exercise. I’m going to try to retain whatever perspective I can on the events, and so I’m going to check the news only once a day. If I can.

We’ve played “Are we there yet?” for six months. Now it’s happening. And of course we all want it to be as quick and bloodless as possible, so the new mantra is “Is it over yet?”

Salam’s entry for today, directly from Baghdad. It gave me the chills.

Today we’re going to war with Iraq.

Outside my window, the sun shines in a sky of insolent blue. The birds in my backyard are trying to outdo each other with their trills. I wish that, like them, I could be Zen about everything. But it’s impossible. Soon, bombs will start raining on Baghdad and some 200,000 American troops and half a million Baghdadis will be put in harm’s way.

I rarely think in absolutes, so I won’t say that every war is wrong. But this one is very wrong, and very reckless.

Those who support the war say that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Yet there has been no smoking gun. Whatever intelligence the U.S. says it has never made it into the hands of the inspectors, and when it did, it never led to any finds. Even more embarrassing is the fact that part of the evidence presented to the U.N. by Colin Powell (and provided to him by Tony Blair) was plagiarized from a student paper (typos and all).

They say we must go to war to provide the people of Iraq with freedom. That is a lofty ideal, and I wholeheartedly support it. But the fact remains that 12 years ago we said the same thing about Kuwait. And yet, despite our intervention, Kuwaiti women still do not have the right to vote.

They say Iraq represents a threat to the American people. Yet even the much talked about Al-Samoud missiles had a range of only 93 miles. We are 6,000 miles away.

They say Saddam and Al-Qaeda are linked. And yet Osama Bin Laden has called Saddam and his Ba’ath party ‘infidels’, a term he usually reserved for Americans.

They say Saddam has used his weapons against his own people. They are talking about the Halabjah massacre, which happened in 1988. At the time, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas. But regardless of who was responsible for the massacre of the Kurds, why is it we’re having a moral problem with it, 15 years later?

I could go on, but the point is that the rationale for the war has not been consistent over the last six months, a fact which makes it abundantly clear that the decision to take over Iraq was made long before a justification had to be found for it. And despite the overwhelming opposition of the world to this, despite the President’s own father’s warnings, war is happening.

There’s no doubt that Saddam’s Republican Guard will be crushed and that the dictator’s days in Baghdad are finished. Beyond the war, however, the outlook is quite bleak. The Administration’s track record in Afghanistan demonstrates that it has no commitment to rebuilding (beyond what will be necessary to produce and export oil). It’s unlikely that a president who has shown such disregard for the UN will allow it to organize free and fair elections. Therefore, the most likely course will be the choice of a pro-US leader. The people will continue to struggle with poverty, as well as their anger over their country being taken over. And we all know what poverty and anger lead to. Soon a Khomeini-like figure will emerge and Iraq, one of the last bastions of secularism in the region, will fall to the fundamentalists. An entire generation of terrorists will be bred, and Bush will have succeeded in making us even less safe than before September 11.

I hope I am wrong.

The French’s retort to the “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” crowd:
“A French Web Site is urging people to send pretzels to the U.S. President, who fainted and fell off a sofa in January 2002 after gagging on the salty snack.
The Web Site, www.bretzelforbush.com, says the pretzels will be stored at a secret location before being sent to the White House in a historic mass action.”

A new poll shows that, after last night’s presidential speech, 66% of Americans now say they support the war. No word on how many of these people belong in the 44% of Americans who believe the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, or the 45% who believe that Hussein is personally responsible for 9/11. And all Bush had to do was not say the words “Osama Bin Laden” (since July 8, 2002) and keep repeating “Saddam Hussein” and “September 11th” in the same speeches.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you may know that I have an obsession with Ahdaf Soueif. This month she’s chairing the judging panel for the 2003 Orange Prize, for which the long list has been announced. The expected names are there of course: Zadie Smith, Alice Sebold, Carol Shields, Donna Tart, et cetera. But I was tickled to see Julie Otsuka’s name there as well. I just started When the Emperor was Divine and am loving it.
In other news, Soueif was also on the judging panel for the 2003 Independent Foreign Fiction prize. And she’ll also be giving a talk at the Lannan Foundation in April.

Book Magazine will now be known as Barnes and Noble Presents Book. The Borders chain isn’t happy.
Link via MobyLives.