Hubris, enemy of ambition, has brought down vast empires and may mark the sunset of the American century, writes Anouar Abdel Malek Here we are in the heart of the storm, at the moment of Abu Ghraib, the symbol of that network of internment camps where torture and degradation are systematically perpetrated in the name of democracy -- democracy American-style, of course. We want to piece things together and point angry fingers, but a thick mist has descended, obscuring our sense of direction. We feel as though we are knocking on the gates of hell and all certainty and hope is about to abandon us. But then, my friend, you said, "Many things are becoming clear." I suggested that we pause for a moment at this moment of transition, just as the victorious centre of hegemony begins to notice that its mountainous perch has begun to crumble beneath it. Then, we started to look at some of the highly revealing documents and commentaries coming out of the US and Britain these days. On 4 May, more than 50 US diplomats sent a letter to President Bush expressing their concerns over his Middle East policy. They had been inspired by that open letter a week earlier from 52 former British diplomats to Prime Minister Tony Blair, strongly criticising his government's support for US Middle East policy. The US diplomats attacked Bush for "defying" UN resolutions calling for Israel's return of occupied territories, for "flouting" UN Resolution 194 affirming the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel and for "undermining" the roadmap. Referring to Bush's recent reassurances to Sharon, they accused Bush of "closing the door to negotiations with Palestinians and the possibility of a Palestinian state", and in so doing proving "that the United States is not an even-handed peace partner". The authors went on to discuss the disastrous repercussions of Bush's policies for the US. "You [Bush] have placed US diplomats, civilians and military doing their jobs overseas in an untenable and even dangerous position. Your unqualified support of Sharon's extra-judicial assassinations, Israel's Berlin Wall-like barrier, its harsh military measures in occupied territories, and now your endorsement of Sharon's unilateral plan are costing our country its credibility, prestige and friends." They then called upon Bush "to reassert American principles of justice and fairness in our relations with all the peoples of the world" and to "support negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, with the US serving as a truly honest broker". Only by returning to "the time- honoured American tradition of fairness" would the US be able to "reverse the present tide of ill will in Europe and the Middle East -- even in Iraq". But will those letters by US and British diplomats have any impact on US and British policy, you ask. Or are they simply cries in the wilderness? A most crucial question, my friend. Did you know, for example, that the Financial Times, which voices the outlook of major international industrial and financial institutions, not only in Europe but the US as well, is voted year in, year out Europe's number one newspaper? Let us agree that we have no reason to question this testimony to that newspaper's journalistic standards and its consistent commitment to the principles of democracy and international law. On 1 May, on its op-ed and letters to the editor page, the Financial Times featured a cartoon that took up nearly half the page. It showed an apparent statue of liberty towering over New York's harbour. But instead of the familiar toga-clad siren, standing alone was an Abu Ghraib victim, hooded and covered in a tattered black rag. In one hand he holds up the torch of freedom. From his other hand dangle electric cables that are wired into the base. This poignant reminder of the horrifying pictures of the actual victims that were televised around the world has no need for a caption. It stands on its own as a powerful indictment against the West, coming straight from the core of the capitalist establishment. Now take, for example, the commentary by Roger Cohen in the International Herald Tribune of 5 May. The columnist quotes Bush's response to a question about his premature "Mission Accomplished" speech, which he had delivered a year ago, on 1 May 2003 from onboard the US aircraft carrier he had chosen as his backdrop for that charade. Bush said, "A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we had accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq." How curious, given that reports of torture and sexual abuse in the Iraqi prisons taken over by the Americans had already been piling up for months in Defense Department offices. Later in the article, Cohen relates, "Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, toured the prison [Abu Ghraib] last summer. He was shown the torture chambers. He was shown where Iraqi prisoners were hanged." He also tells us that Captain Mark Doggett, a spokesman for the American-led coalition military forces in Baghdad, said that Abu Ghraib was being refurbished to bring it "up to Western standards", with medical facilities, improved hygiene and a decent kitchen. "It's a world apart from the condition it was left in by Saddam," Doggett is quoted as saying, "but a lot of work still needs to be done." Cohen remarks, "Just how much work [still needs to be done] has been made clear by the photographs first broadcast by CBS on 28 April showing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, stripped naked, hooded, piled up like the corpses that once accumulated in this nightmarish place, being tortured by their American captors." An army report obtained by The New Yorker spoke of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" in Abu Ghraib -- hardly "a world apart" from the days of Saddam Hussein So what of all these documents and commentaries, you ask in a bored and impatient tone. Everyone knows that these incidents of torture in Iraq have been known in official quarters in Washington for months, at least since November 2003. Never mind what's going on in Afghanistan and Palestine. Next, Donald Rumsfeld comes along and defends the values of the US army and apologises before the Congressional investigatory committees on 7 May. What do these values have to do with this present age of invasion and torture? Another very good question, one that even seemed to baffle Congress. The secretary of defense's depositions to the congressional committees had much in common with a company board of directors' reports to concerned shareholders. Steps were laid out in chronological order. Each step was carefully examined in terms of how they could, or could not, be traced to orders from above. Mistakes were made, of course, but these were attributed to routine slip-ups, the kind every bureaucracy is prone to. And at regular interludes there sounded the refrain extolling the greatness of the US, the lofty values of its armed forces and its shining record in the pursuit of spreading freedom, democracy and prosperity around the world. Indeed, when Rumsfeld proffered his apology and took responsibility for what happened, this was encased between two reverberating refrains of this sort. Rumsfeld's apology, issued after congressional committee members had begun to hone in on the chain of command issue, seemed intended to salvage the reputation and honour of President Bush in his capacity as "supreme commander of the armed forces". Nor did he forget to once again remind his audience of the glorious achievements of US forces under the supreme command of Bush and his predecessors. Who does he think he's fooling? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of modern history is aware of page after luminous page in the record of the US armed forces, beginning in 1945 with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the burning of Tokyo and the carpet bombing of most other Japanese cities, yielding a civilian death rate higher than that sustained by the combating armed forces. Soon afterwards came the Korean war with its toll of a million dead, followed by the war in Vietnam and more than three million Vietnamese dead, not to mention a quarter of a million US soldiers. Then followed that series of engineered coups d'état and civil wars, from Congo to Cuba and Nicaragua to Chile, and all the while Washington sustained its unswerving support for the Zionist state, that impregnable fortress for spearheading the subjugation of Arab states and peoples. You interrupt. How do you explain why members of the congressional investigatory committees were so hesitant, as though afraid to go too far? Why did most of those committee members appear so keen to restrict responsibility for Abu Ghraib to the Department of Defense, as though that government agency were an isolated island of iniquity and bureaucratic bungling in an otherwise tranquil sea of glittering virtues and competence? I would suggest that this indicates that US public opinion, together with the vast majority of the Western political and intellectual elite, believes that the US stands apart and above the rest of the countries of the world. This sense of superiority is at the root of the concept of America's "exceptionalism", which is reiterated so often over there, as though Americans were of a different breed than other human beings. There is no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this score; they both voice the same national chauvinism. Perhaps, too, the Zionist camp in the Democratic Party, which had rallied around Senator Liebermann when he stood for vice president in the last presidential elections, is the clearest exponent of this common denominator between the two parties that represent the American people. Did not Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state under Clinton, declare: We are the people of an "indispensable nation" that "stands taller and sees farther" than all others? I am reminded of the panel on narcissism at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, during which Dr Bandy Xenobia Lee, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University, quoted the standard medical description of narcissistic personality disorder from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. A sufferer form this disorder is someone who "has a grandiose sense of self importance, eg, exaggerates successes and talents, expects to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements". He is "preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance; requires excessive admiration; has a sense of entitlement, ie unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations; shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes". There is a smooth, uninterrupted line connecting the Yale professor's speech at Davos and Rumsfeld's "defence" in front of the congressional committees. That line is the Americans' blaring declarations of superiority over all other peoples in this world. The day after Rumsfeld's appearance before the congressional committees The New York Times tried to contain the crisis. Two of its op-ed pieces that day demanded Rumsfeld's resignation. One wrote that the US was so embarrassed by the Abu Ghraib scandal that officials in Washington delayed the publication of the State Department's annual human rights report for a week because of the worldwide derision it would provoke. It asked Bush to show some sign that he understood the severity of the situation. Not only was it important for Rumsfeld to step down, the piece insisted that Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a leading architect of the Iraqi invasion, would not be an appropriate replacement. However, the columnist stopped short at demanding a new team with a new way of thinking to take over the Defense Department as a whole. The second op-ed piece observed that US intelligence, in spite of its best efforts, had never been able to come up with hard evidence linking the Saddam regime with Al-Qaeda before the invasion. That, however, was when Americans began to view Iraqis as suspect terrorists. The article goes on to assert that the grotesque human rights abuses perpetrated at Abu Ghraib and throughout the network of military detention camps had tarnished the reputation of the US and fed Bin Laden's attempts to portray America as an evil nation. The Bush administration presented a gift to Al-Qaeda's international recruitment efforts, the writer concluded. I don't know why, my friend, but I cannot help but to recall, here, a story about Confucius (551-479 BC). One evening, after the daily discussion circle, a Chinese nobleman asked the famous sage whether words could bring down a state. Confucius responded that there existed no words that could do that on their own. However, he continued, if a ruler is so infatuated with his own power that no one dare ever oppose him, agreeing with the ruler brings no harm if the ruler is right. However, if the ruler is wrong, it is then possible to say that there are words that could destroy the state. The concept of exceptionalism lies at the root of the quest to monopolise power. Perhaps this is the signpost pointing to the beginning of the fall, the crumbling of the reputation, status and influence of the centre of global hegemony, an American sunset after Abu Ghraib.
