On November 6, 1990, some 50 women met in a supermarket parking lot in Riyadh. The women dismissed their drivers and drove their cars in tandem through the streets of Riyadh, defying publicly an unofficial but strictly observed ban on women’s driving. In Saudi Arabia, where women may not travel without permission from their nearest male relative, work where men are present or even enter most government ministries, and where political gatherings for everyone, men and women, are illegal, the driving demonstration was viewed as revolutionary.
It takes two to make a war, and there were indeed two protagonists in making this war. On the one hand, there was the United States, which wanted the war for a number of reasons, primarily global: to consecrate its world hegemony, to liquidate any sequels to bipolarism, to marginalize Europe and Japan, to control Arab oil at the start of the coming millennium. On the other hand, there was Saddam Hussein who, even as victim, agreed to play the role of criminal, providing George Bush the opportunity to make an example of a Third World country.
No blood for oil! The rallying cry of many of those who took to the streets in protest against the Gulf war is simple. Is it too simple? “Even a dolt understands the principle,” said one unnamed US official, “We need the oil. It’s nice to talk about standing up for freedom, but Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are not exactly democracies, and if their principal export were oranges, a mid-level State Department official would have issued a statement and we would have closed Washington down for August.” [1]
In 1926 the French surrealist, Rene Magritte, painted an unmistakable pipe and labeled it, in careful schoolboy script: “This is not a pipe.” In 1991 George Bush began a war in the Persian Gulf which, he insisted, was not Vietnam. Iraq, he pointed out, is a desert; Vietnam was a jungle. Moreover, Iraq was not Vietnam because this time the US would win.
It was at this point that Iraq became Vietnam. The difference between Iraq and Vietnam, according to the president and his men, did not lie in their histories, cultures, political ideologies or geographies, but only in what the US had not done to one and would most certainly do to the other.
Edward Said is Parr Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a member of the Palestine National Council and a contributing editor of this magazine. Along with Noam Chomsky, he is one of the foremost opposition public intellectuals in the United States, a role he plays in the Arab world as well. Barbara Harlow interviewed him in New York in early April 1991.
How would you characterize the portrayal of the Gulf crisis and war in the US and in Europe?
Joost Hiltermann, an editor of this magazine, traveled through Iraq from March 23 to April 10, 1991, as Middle East field coordinator of the Boston-based organization Physicians for Human Rights. The delegation, whose mission was to study the impact of the Gulf war and civil conflict on the health of Iraq’s civilian population, went to Baghdad, Basra, al-Zubayr, Karbala’, Najaf, Kirkuk, Suleimaniya and Erbil.
The human toll of the Persian Gulf war — as many as 100,000 deaths, 5 million displaced persons and over $200 billion in property damage — ranks this conflict as the single most devastating event in the Middle East since World War I.
The US military deployment to Saudi Arabia was on a scale not seen since the height of the Vietnam war. The “victory” parade in Washington on June 8 was the largest celebratory military exhibition, we are told, since World War II. The parade, like the war, was designed in part to obliterate the historical memory of Vietnam. So intent was this message that you could see the erasure of significant aspects of the Gulf war as well.
What About Women?
I have your November-December 1990 issue and your special packet, “Crisis in the Gulf.” They are both excellent but they do not have much on one very important area of concern: women.
In particular, I would like to see an article on the women of Iraq. In Sisterhood Is Global, Robin Morgan covers Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran, but not Iraq. I have heard that women do not have to wear a veil and do participate in the military. I know the National Organization of Women has some information, but not much. Also, since Robin Morgan’s book was published in 1984, we could use an update on the other countries I named.
Lee Heller
San Francisco
Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State: Essays on Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East (Routledge, 1989).
Modem Western literature on political Islam in the Middle East today generally falls into two categories: US-style think tank writing and intellectual proselytism.
Think tank “scholarship” addresses Islam as a threat. Its essential concern is how Islam as represented by the Moroccan, Pakistani and Saudi governments, so congenial to the West, could suddenly tum into the hostage-taking, anti-Western Islam of the Iranian revolution. “Why did Islam become an enemy?” is the question; the answer can only be as bad as the premises within which it is formulated.
Berch Berberoglu, ed., Power and Stability in the Middle East (Zed, 1989).
Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East: State, Class and Economic Development (Westview, 1990).
Conditions in Iraq in the aftermath of the US military assault have been difficult to ascertain. The most authoritative report to date is that of the UN mission led by Undersecretary-General Martti Ahtisaari, which spent March 10-17 in Iraq. The mission, which included representatives of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and other UN programs, had intended to examine conditions first in Kuwait and then Iraq, but the Kuwaiti authorities requested it delay its arrival there until a UN Environment Program mission had completed its work.
George Bush’s war against Iraq came and went more quickly than most people expected, but its consequences will be with us for years to come. This is true first and foremost for the tens of thousands of Iraqi families who lost loved ones, or saw their homes and livelihoods destroyed, but it is also true for millions of other Arabs who will certainly draw conclusions from the willingness — indeed, the eagerness — with which the US unleashed its military might against an Arab country whose leader had stepped out of line.
Apart from the cost in human suffering and Arab anger, however, the rapid US military victory left debris of a different kind in its wake: a lot of war-related merchandise which may now be hard to dispose of.
From the beginning, the Gulf crisis aroused a level of interest and concern in India unusual for an international issue not directly involving this country. Much of our oil comes from the Gulf region, and “Gulf money” in the form of remittances from Indians working in Iraq and the Gulf states has become a significant source of upward mobility in recent years. Then there was the major problem of evacuation of Indians from Kuwait and Iraq, which the government of V. P. Singh managed fairly efficiently.
On May 22, 1990, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (the PDRY, or South Yemen) and the Yemen Arab Republic (the YAR, or North Yemen) joined to become the Republic of Yemen. “A Tale of Two Families” reflects the malaise in North Yemen on the eve of unification; the situation in the south, since the 1986 street battles in Aden, was even worse. [1]
Unity offered beneficial economies of scale in oil, power, administrative apparatus and tourism. It made political sense, too, reflecting the view of most Yemenis that the division into separate countries was artificial and imposed.
Virtually every aspect of life in North Yemen has changed dramatically since 1977, including those aspects of Yemeni society which represent continuity with the past: tribalism, rural life and use of qat. [1] The driving force for change has been economic. By 1975, Yemen was caught up in the dramatic developments that affected all Arab countries. Rising international oil prices generated enormous surpluses in the producing countries, enabling them to initiate ambitious development plans and forcing them to import workers.
