I was stopped by someone the other week who said it was not surprising there was so much terrorism in the world when we invaded their countries (meaning Afghanistan and Iraq). No wonder Muslims felt angry.There's just so much wrong with this comment that it's hard to know where to begin. Greenwald has done an admirable job detailing the grotesquely imperialistic worldview that Blair's statement reveals, and I would encourage everyone to read his entire post. For my purposes, however, it's sufficient to focus on one aspect: orientalism.
When he had finished, I said to him: tell me exactly what they feel angry about. We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.
What’s more, British troops are risking their lives trying to prevent the killing. Why should anyone feel angry about us? Why aren’t they angry about the people doing the killing? The odd thing about the conversation is that I could tell it was the first time he had even heard the alternative argument.
The term "orientalism," most famously articulated by the late Edward Said, refers to the grand narrative that Europeans told themselves about the "orientals" of the Middle East, that those peoples, mostly Muslims and Arabs, were irrational, effeminate, ungovernable, childlike, and inferior. Having thus created a self-contained representation of the "oriental," Imperial Europe could justify its colonization of the Middle East as bringing superior European values to inferior beings. As but one grand experiment in Orientalist thinking, we have Iraq, which Britain colonized, and, when finally driven out in 1958, left a mess in its wake. Fifty years later, Britain decided once again that Iraqis were incapable of governing themselves, and regime change was in order; Britain is once again occupying Iraq, and Iraq is once again a colonial disaster that a majority of Iraqis now say is even worse than Saddam Hussein's brutal regime.
What, then, of Tony Blair's comments? He says that the person he was speaking to had probably never even considered his argument. I would guess that that's because his argument is too stupid to give any serious thought to. Would we really expect Iraqis to be happy that Blair removed a brutal and dictatorial regime? Perhaps we would, if nothing else had changed. But other things did change: even notwithstanding the Iraqi regime was itself a product of Britain's long history of imperial domination, the answer is still "no," because the cost of removing that regime was too high.
We might well ask the following of Tony Blair: if England invaded the US; and then banned both the Democratic and Republican parties (justified because neither of them has positive approval ratings); and then banned the military; and then banned the police; and then let everyone out of jail (in fairness, it was Hussein, not Blair, that did this, as part of his last-ditch effort to forestall an invasion); and then bombed infrastructure so that medical care was unavailable, unemployment was 60%, electricity (including for air conditioning and refrigeration) was available only one hour per day, sewage covered the streets, and clean water was available only sporadically; and at the end of 4 years was still occupying the country while having killed somewhere between 2.5% to 4% of the population (roughly the equivalent of a 9-11 every two-and-a-half days, or 8-12 million Americans); would we be happy about it? And if everything wasn't going swimmingly, would we blame it on Americans?
I doubt many Americans would be happy with this situation. But Blair seems to believe Iraqis should be grateful for exactly this situation. He seems unable to comprehend that he might have something to do with the disaster that is Iraq. On the contrary, he's the noble Englishman who can do no wrong. Therefore, if there's anything wrong in Iraq, it must be Iraqis' fault. And why shouldn't he blame the victim? After all, it's quite convenient to do so when the victim is either dead, dying, or too busy trying not to get blown up to be heard.
This is the beauty of orientalism. It means Tony Blair doesn't have to worry about what the people he speaks for think, or what they want, or how many of them die. All that matters is that they should be grateful.
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