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Iraq's False Promises Author(s): Slavoj Zizek Reviewed work(s): Source: Foreign Policy, No. 140 (Jan. - Feb., 2004), pp. 42-49 Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4147518 . Accessed: 21/07/2012 08:03
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FALSE ROMIS
invaded Iraq,read Ifyou wantto understand theBushadministration why

Freud's Security Interpretation of Dreams, nottheNational Strategy of the United States.Onlythetwisted of dreams eiplain theUnited can logic why States that thinks theaggressive pursuit contradictory of goals-promoting
U.S. hegemony, ensuring and stableenergysupplies-will affirming democracy, success. By Slavoj Zizek I produce
o illustrateweird ofdreams,of inconsistentarguments,of course, confirmsprethe logic
SigmundFreudused to evoke a story about a borrowed kettle: When a friendaccusesyou of returninga borrowed kettle broken, your reply is, first, that you neverborrowedthe kettle;second,that you returned it unbroken;and third, that the kettle was already brokenwhen you borrowedit. Suchan enumeration
Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and senior researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana,Slovenia. His books, most recently Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2003), have been translated into more than 20 languages.

o ,, Ic Z 0 m ,,

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cisely what it endeavors to deny: that you, in fact, did borrow and break the kettle. A similarstring of inconsistenciescharacterized the Bushadministration's for publicjustifications the U.S. attackon Iraqin early2003. First,the administration claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed which posed a (WMD), weapons of mass destruction "realand presentdanger"to his neighbors,to Israel, Westernstates. So far,no such and to all democratic havebeenfound (aftermorethan 1,000 U.S. weapons havespentmonthslookingfor them).Then, specialists that doesnot the administration argued evenif Saddam have any WMD,he was involvedwith al Qaedain the
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8

Iraq's False Promises

shouldbe punished 11 September attacksandtherefore andprevented fromlaunching futureassaults. even But U.S. President Bushhad to concedein SepGeorgeW. tember2003 that the United States"hadno evidence that Saddam Husseinwas involvedwith September the 11th."Finally, therewas the thirdlevelof justification, that even if therewas no proof of a linkwith al Qaeda,Saddam's ruthless was dictatorship a threatto its neighbors and a catastrophle its own to and these facts were reason people, enough to topple it. True, but why toppleIraqandnot otherevilregimes, startingwith Iranand North Korea, the two other members of Bush's infamous"axis of evil"? So, if thesereasonsdon'thold up to serious scrutinyand merelyseem to suggest that the administrationwas misguidedto do what it did, what, then, were the real underlying reasons for the attack?Effectively,there were three: first,a sincereideologicalbeliefthat the destinyof the United States is to bring democracy and prosperity to other nations; second, the urge to brutallyassert and signal unconditionalU.S. hegemony;and third, the need to control Iraqi oil reserves. Each of the three levels works on its own and deservesto be taken seriously; none of them, includshould be dismissed ing the spreadof democracy, as a simplemanipulation lie.Eachhasits own and contradictions consequences, good and and for ill. But taken together,they are dangerously inconsistentand incompatibleand all but the predestine U.S. effortin Iraqto failure.
THE NOT-SO-QUIET AMERICAN

freedomto the Vietnamese,only to see his intentions totally misfire:"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." The suppositionunderlying these good intentions is that underneathour skins, we are all Americans.If that is humanity's true desire,then all that Americans

Iffreedom God's to humanity, theUnited is and gift as chosen States itself God's sees then instrument, those oppose policies rejecting who U.S. are the to noblest ofGod humanity. gift
need to do is to give people a chance, liberatethem fromtheirimposedconstraints, theywill embrace and America'sideologicaldream.No wonder the United Stateshas movedfrom "containing" enemyto prothe a "capitalist as StephenSchwartz revolution," moting of the Foundationfor the Defenseof Democracies put it in February 2003. The United Statesis now, as the

Americans have historically seen their role in the world in altruisticterms. "We just try to be good," they say, "to help others, to bring peace and prosperity, and look what we get in return."In fact, movies such as John Ford'sThe Searchers and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver or books like Graham Greene'sThe Quiet American, which provide fundamental insight into the naive benevolence of Americans, have never been more relevant than with today's global U.S. ideological offensive. As Greene said about his Americanprotagonist,who sincerely wants to bring democracy and Western
44
FOREIGN POLICY

defunctSovietUnion was decadesago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. But when Bush said in his January2003 State of the Union message, "The liberty we prize is not America's to the world, it is God'sgift to humangift ity," this apparent burst of humility, in fact, concealed its totalitarian opposite. Every totalitarian leaderclaimsthat, in himself,he is nothing at all:His of strengthis only the strength, the people who stand behindhim, whose deepeststrivingsonly he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leaderby definitionnot only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people. And does the same not hold for Bush's claim? It would have been easierif freedomeffectivelywere to be just the United States' gift to other nations; that way, those who oppose U.S. policies would merely be against the policies of a single nation-state. But if freedom is God's gift to humanity,and the U.S. government sees itself as the chosen instrument for showering this gift on all the nations of the world, then those who oppose U.S. policies are rejectingthe noblest gift of God to humanity. As for the secondreason,the urgeto demonstrate unconditionalU.S. hegemony,the Bush administra-

tion's National SecurityStrategycalls for translating America's"positionof unparalleled militarystrength and great economic and political influence" into "decadesof peace, prosperity, and liberty."But neothinkersspeakin baldertermswhat their conservative brethrenin the White House cannot. In their recent William book, The Warover Iraq, neoconservatives Kristoland LawrenceE Kaplanwrite, "Themission begins in Baghdad,but it does not end there.... We stand at the cusp of a new historicalera.... This is a decisivemoment.... It is so clearlyabout more than Iraq.It is about moreeventhan the futureof the Middle East and the war on terror.It is about what sort of role the United Statesintendsto play in the twenOne cannotbut agreewith that statety-firstcentury." ment: The U.S. attack on Iraqhas effectivelyput the future of the international communityat stake, raisfundamental questions about the "new world ing order" and what rules will regulateit.

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Iraq's False Promises

Regarding the third reason for launching an attack,it would be simplisticto assumethat the United States intended to take over Iraq's oil industry lock, stock, and barrel. But in a country that, as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, "floats on a sea of oil," the installation of a U.S.blessed governmentthat is committedto permitting foreign (read:U.S.) investmentin its oil industryand that enjoys an influentialperch at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was surely an important consideration for U.S. policymakers. would have been Indeed,to ignorethat consideration a case of strategicmalpracticeon a grand scale. AMERICA'S EMPIRE BURLESQUE Of these three reasons, the key factor is the second one: using Iraq as a pretext or exemplary case to establish the parametersof the new world order,to assert the right of the United States to launch preventivestrikesand thus to cementits statusas the sole global policing power. The message behind the U.S. attack was not primarilyaddressedto the Iraqipeople but to all of us witnessingthe war-we were the true ideological and political targets. At this point, one should ask the naive question: the United States as global policeman-why not? After all, the post-Cold-War world effectively

is The with United States not problem today's but while thatit is a new empire, that, global it to to pretendingbeanempire, continues actas a nation-state, its ruthlessly pursuing interests.
begged for some global power to fill in the void. Ah, but there's the rub: The problem with today's United States is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not, i.e., that, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its interests. Indeed, in a perverse reversal of the old ecological slogan, the bumper sticker for the Bush administration'sforeign policy could well be "act globally, think locally." Look, for example, at the U.S. decision to impose steel tariffs,ruled illegal by the WorldTrade Organization and certainly in violation of its own
46
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sacrosanct advice to developing countries to open themselves to the global market. Another stunningexample of U.S. double-think it was the two-sidedpressure exertedon Serbiain the summer of 2003. U.S. officials demandedthat Serbia deliver suspected war criminalsto the International CriminalTribunalfor the FormerYugoslavia in The Hague (in accordance with the logic of the judicial global empire,which demandstransnational institutions);but they also simultaneouslypressured Serbia to sign a bilateral treaty obliging it not to deliver to the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) any U.S. citizens suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with the logic of the nation-state).No wonder the Serbreactionwas one of perplexedfury. And does the same inconsistency not hold for how the United States is waging the "war on terror"? The exemplary economic strategy of today's over the capitalism is outsourcing-handing "dirty" process of material production (but also publicity,design, accounting, etc.) to anothercompany. Production takes place in, say, Indonesia, where environmental and labor standards are much lower than in the West, and the Western company that owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for violations by its contractors. Now, something homologous is taking place with the interrogation terrorsusof to with torture "outsourced" pects, same Third World allies (those countriescriticizedin the U.S. State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices) who can coerce confessions without worryingabout legalproblems or public protest. "We can't legalize torture; it's contrary to American values," sniffed columnist Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, while nonetheless concluding that "we'll have to think about transferringsome suspects to our less squeamishallies, even if that'shypocritical.Nobody said this was going to be pretty."And so it goes with FirstWorlddemocracies,which outsourcemoreand more of their dirty undersides,whether telemarketing or torture, to other countries. The opportunity to bring the war on terror within the scope of an internationallegal orderhas been squandered. Why? To borrow the words of Muhammad Said al-Sahaf,the colorful Iraqiinformation minister who, in one of his last press con-

ferences during the war, reportedly denied that Americans controlled parts of Baghdad: "[The Americans] are not in control of anything-they don't even control themselves!" Simply put, U.S. policymakers lack the self-awareness to recognize, let alone reconcile, the contradictions between and among their intentions and their actions. In February2002, U.S. Defense SecretaryDonald Rumsfeld engaged in a bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationshipbetween the known and the unknown: "Thereare known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns;that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also

unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we don't know." For Rumsfeld, these "unknown unknowns" representthe greatestthreats facing the United States.But Rumsfeldforgot to add the crucial fourth term:the unknown knowns, things we don't know that we know-which is preciselythe Freudian unconscious,the "knowledgewhich doesn'tknow itself," as the French psychoanalystJacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adheringto, may pose an even greater threat. That is indeed the case with the reasons for this war. What is "unknown" (disavowed, ignored) is not primarilythe problematicnatureof those rea-

Too

Much

Vision

Thing
dom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment,and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be recklessto acceptthe statusquo. Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requiresthe same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace. The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country... And we believe that freedom-the freedom we prize-is not for us alone. It is the right and the capacity of all mankind. Working for the spread of freedom can be hard. Yet, Americahas accomplishedhard tasks before. Our nation is strong; we're strong of heart.
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Excerptsfrom U.S. President George W. Bush'sspeech on in freedom IraqandtheMiddle Eastat the 20th anniversary of the National Endowmentfor Democracyon Nov. 6, 2003.

powerof the military-so that governmentsrespond to the will of the people,and not the will of an elite.Successful societies protectfreedomwith the consistentand impartialrule of law, instead of selectively of hesacrificesAmeri- applying the law to punish cans have not always politicalopponents.... been recognized or [Securing democracy in have been Iraq]is a massiveand difficult appreciated,yet they worthwhile.... undertaking-it is worth our As changes come to the effort, it is worth our sacriMiddle Eastern region, those fice, because we know the with power should ask them- stakes. The failure of Iraqi selves:Will they be remembered democracy would embolden for resistingreform,or for lead- terroristsaround the world, ing it? In Iran, the demand for and increase dangers to the democracyis strongand broad, Americanpeople, and extinas we saw last month when guish the hopes of millionsin thousandsgatheredto welcome the region. Iraqi democracy home Shirin Ebadi, the winner will succeed-and thatsuccess of the Nobel Peace Prize. The will sendforththe news, from regime in Teheran must heed Damascus to Teheran-that the democraticdemands of the freedomcan be the future of Iranian people, or lose its last every nation. The establishclaim to legitimacy.... mentof a freeIraqat the heart There are, however, essen- of the Middle East will be a tial principlescommon to every watershedevent in the global successful society, in every cul- democratic revolution.... ture. Successful societies limit ...As long as the Middle a freethe power of the state and the Eastremains placewhere

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Iraq's False Promises

sons as such (say,the fact that in spreadingdemocracy,the UnitedStatesis imposingits own versionof democracy), but, rather,the inconsistency among those reasons.The United Statesis pursuinga series of goals (spreadingdemocracy,asserting its hegeoil that areultimately incommony,securing supplies) Consider countries like Saudi Arabia and patible. Kuwait, conservative monarchies, but economic allies, deeply integrated into Western capitalism. For Here,the UnitedStateshas a verypreciseinterest: these nations to provide dependableoil reservesfor
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the United States, they must remain undemocratic, since it is a safe bet that democratic elections in Saudi Arabia or Iraq would produce an Islamist, nationalistregimeridingon anti-American attitudes. "Sixtyyearsof Westernnationsexcusingand accommodatingthe lack of freedomin the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," declaredBushin November 2003 [See sidebar on page 47]. But it did give Westerncountries relativelystable energy supplies, something that the United States is unlikelyto sacrifice overnighton the altar of freedom.

Moreover, despite Bush's talk of a "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East," we know now what bringing democracy means: The United Statesand its "willing partners"ultimatelydecide if a country is ripe for democracyand what form that democracy should take. Witness Rumsfeld's comment in April 2003 that Iraq should not become a theocracy,but a tolerantsecularcountryin which all religionsand ethnic groups enjoyedthe same rights. U.S. officials have reacted with barely muted discomfort to the possibility that a new Iraqiconstitution might give Islam a privileged position. The irony here is twofold: Not only would it be nice if the United States were to demand the same from Israel with regard to Judaism, but while Saddam's

Iraq alreadywas a secular state, the likely result of democratic elections would be the privileging of Islam! One unnamed senior U.S. figure even stated, accordingto the BritishnewspaperThe Independent, "the first foreignpolicy gestureof a democraticIraq would be to recognize Israel." Instead,what is likely to emergeas a resultof the U.S. occupation in Iraqis preciselya fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement,directlylinkedto such movementsin other Arabcountriesor countries with a Muslimpresence.It is as if, in a contemporary display of the "cunning of reason," some invisible hand of destinyrepeatedly ensuresthat the U.S. intervention only makes more likely the outcomes the United Statessought most to avoid. 1W

Want to Know More?

Rebecca Mead's profile of Slavoj Zizek, "The Marx Brother" (The New Yorker,May 5, 2003), describes Zizek as a "masterof the counterintuitive observation." Three of Zizek's recent books provide insight into his geopolitical views: Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002) examines the war on terrorism;Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (New York: Verso, 2001) highlights the weaknesses of liberaldemocratic ideologies; and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The PerverseCore of Christianity (Cambridge: MITPress, 2003) provides a political reading of Christianity. FrenchphilosopherAlain Badioucondemns the liberalethic of "respectfor otherness"in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (New York: Verso, 2001). Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishing Co., 1898) analyzes the rise of Napoleon and underscores the challenges of political representation and ideological justification. Readers interested in Sigmund Freud's thinking on the contradictory reasoning of dreams may turn to The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: The Macmillan company, 1913). Visit the Web site of the White House for the full text of the Bush administration's"National SecurityStrategyof the United States of America,"issued in September2002, as well U.S. President George W. Bush'sspeech "PresidentBush Discusses Freedomin Iraq and the Middle East" (Washington, November 6, 2003). For a guide to the challenges facing the United States in postwar Iraq, consult the CarnegieEndowmentSpecialReport "FromVictoryto Success:AfterwarPolicy in Iraq" (FOREIGN POLICY, July/August 2003). Lawrence E Kaplan and William Kristol lay out a neoconservativevision for the U.S. role in the world in TheWarover Iraq:Saddam'sTyrannyand America's Mission (San Francisco:EncounterBooks, 2003). A trio of U.S. films offers provocative perspectiveson U.S. ideology. See Martin Scorsese'sTaxi Driver (Columbia Pictures, 1976) for its portrait of the aggressive outburst of a disillusioned redeemer; Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American (Miramax, 2002) for its portrayal of the catastrophic U.S. effort to democratize Vietnam (based on the Graham Greene novel of the same name); and David Fincher'sFight Club (TwentiethCenturyFox, 1999) for insights on some of the more troubling forms of resistanceto global capitalism. ))For links to relevantWeb sites, access to the FP Archive, and a comprehensiveindex of related FOREIGN POLICYarticles,go to www.foreignpolicy.com.
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