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A kidnapped Bush and The Book of Madness
Destroy your enemy, then become him, seems to be the long and short of it.
cairolive.com presents a detailed critical analysis of Mohamed Hassanein Heikal's "An American and International Inferno."
By Tarek Atia
Many looked forward to reading what longtime political analyst Mohamed Hassanein Heikal would say about the epoch-changing events of September 11.
Heikal finally spoke, in a major essay in this month's Al-Kutob Wighat Nazar, the prestigious literary magazine. In "An American and International Inferno," Heikal deals with the September 11-inspired shifts in global US power, empowering our understanding of where the world may be headed both politically and morally.
A kidnapped Bush
 Heikal begins the piece by describing Bush -- the world's most powerful man -- as a prisoner of his own security detail in the first few hours after the September 11 attacks. Only when his mother -- former first lady Barbara Bush -- tells him every man, woman, and child in America is depending on him to get back to his desk, does he go back to the White House.
As part of the picture he paints of the US without a true leader for 10 hours or so, Heikal posits that the medicine chosen to deal with the wound at hand -- closing US airspace for 5 days -- was more damaging than the illness.
That is a very telling observation by Heikal.
By closely examining both CIA and Pentagon position papers put out in the last half decade, Heikal maps out that US government agencies had a strong awareness that such an event could take place -- why then, he asks, was everyone seemingly surprised?
All of which is to suggest, of course, that American politics ain't what they used to be... or, as Heikal seems to be arguing throughout the piece, that ever since destroying the Soviet Union the US is busy becoming more like its former enemy. And now that it has a new enemy, that's all the better since the war this time will be far more draconian and sinister.
Heikal also prefaces his tome with a description of the vast terrorist and criminal underworld -- primarily an economic enterprise, which includes private militias for sale to the highest bidder -- a global terror network built up in parallel to more formal globalization, which like its cousin knows no boundaries or nations.
It's third world policies that are being sought out now in Washington, Heikal argues.To fight the enemy it looks like the US will be borrowing some of the very tactics it fought in the old enemy -- communism. Things like wider state control and censorship, and the whole Big Brother atmosphere it always hated.
He predicts the downfall of a US becoming more 3rd world in its internal security policies.
"There is no doubt that the US will be transformed from the inside out into a military dictatorship that will bring it down from its pinnacle at the pecking order of modernity to a 3rd world country run by emergency laws."
Heikal mentions the media gag order on news of gold being looted from stores near the WTC days after September 11 -- since that would have ruined the angelic picture of the heroic US police and fire personnel who he says were probably the ones who did it.
The Book of Madness
Heikal plays with language as he describes the US's studied reaction to such an "asymmetrical" declaration of war. If the enemy does not play by the book of rules (Kitab al-Qanoun, book of law) and instead uses kitab al-gunoon (literally the book of madness) will the US also leave international law behind and borrow a chapter of madness from the terrorist's book?
Heikal wonders why the US military was immediately put into high gear and deployed throughout the world when this was not part of military experts' carefully drawn up plan to fight the new kind of war. Was it just a show of force?
Heikal says if the US plan to inspire fear throughout the world is followed through it will turn the current century -- widely thought to be an American one -- from a dream to a nightmare.
Heikal predates the September 11 attacks with growing evidence in policy-making circles of the trend towards a vast differential in the power of the respective enemies in war. In their own separate ways, the image of a stone-throwing Palestinian child against a tank-wielding army, and the rubber boat attack on the giant USS Cole, provide metaphors for this new kind of imbalance. As did, Heikal argues, the anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Davos and Genoa over the past 2 years.
As for the current #1 suspect, Heikal begins by telling the background of Afghanistan, in which he posits that the mujahideen were fighting within an American construct that the Soviet-puppet regime in Kabul were infidels, though they had shown no enmity to Islam.
"And all the evidence points," he writes, "to the fact that Arab and Muslim youth lost their purpose and their lives in a meaningless war against an "enemy" that had never proved its enmity either to Arabs or Muslims... though it was accused of heresy."
This begs a question: Is the same sort of "constructed enemy" precept occurring now and on both sides -- without their being any real evidence to prove it?
Frankenstein's monster
When the US pulled out of Afghanistan, having achieved its aims, Heikal writes that bin Laden could either give up his fight against the infidels -- and look like a CIA lackey -- or continue on, giving the impression that for him, it was always a war against infidelity.
As such he compares bin Laden to Dr Frankenstein's monster -- which had to eventually be destroyed, ripped apart, and burned to the ground for the whole world to be saved.
Not convinced that bin Laden is the culprit, Heikal lays out the possibilities for who may have been behind the attacks. Heikal suggests it could have been a hitherto unknown player -- one to be reckoned with, since he had no need for practice runs, though the act itself had no precedent -- revealing a completely new way of thinking.
Heikal's quote makes it seem like a movie.
"There was no before or after. The act was enough in and of itself, introduction, conclusion, everything. A revenge hit or punishment orchestrated with extreme precision from the very first moment and to its final scene."
He presents a convincing argument about the Serbs -- angry and defeated -- striking a blow at the power that humiliated them. The Balkans have always been a tinderbox, setting the sparks that started WWI, Heikal writes. Maybe the tinderboxes all got together to teach the US a lesson...
(cairolive.com, October 15, 2001)
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