The Clash of Fundamentalisms

Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1943 (before Indian independence and partition), Tariq Ali is a strong critic of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Along with Noam Chomsky, he is a favorite thinker among politicos unwilling to be spoon fed the doctrines of corporate media in the U.S. and Britain. I met him through http://counterpunch.org/, but he's been an active voice critical of the U.S. Empire since Vietnam. His The Clash of Fundamentalisms indicts religious zealotry of every persuasion, placing jihadists, Zionists and Christian right-wingers on even turf. This book posits that obsessive and rigid moralism is as problematic in world relations as capitalist greed. To you and I that might be obvious. Apparently it isn't as obvious to many religious fanatics around the globe. Another Ali theory argues that Americans are woefully ignorant of geography and history. Many of us lefties can attest to that, knowing people before the Iraq War who asked, Where is Iraq? Once the bombs fell, people sort of understood, if you could pull them away from Fox News and reality T.V. for a moment.

Ali's Bush in Babylon was an unrelenting attack on George W. Bush and the neocons' war in Iraq. A reason I like Ali so much is because he brings a heightened level of cultural analysis to his political writing, citing the importance of poetics in the Arab imagination and political discourse. He is fond of the Iraqi poet Saadi Youseff, who published this in 2003 as the invasion of Iraq unfolded.

from America, America
by Saadi Youssef

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.

Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the stone age?


Mainstream American commentators, even if they should find the occasional urge to criticize U.S. foreign policy, would never think of citing poetry in their analyses. Poetry is for the academics in the U.S., compartmentalized, and supposedly hallowed ground (we non-academics know better). The last U.S. politician to openly write poetry was Eugene McCarthy, who wrote in Vietnam Message--


We will take our corrugated steel
out of the land of thatched huts.

We will take our tanks
out of the land of the water buffalo.

We will take our napalm and flame throwers
out of the land that scarcely knows the use of matches.

We will take our helicopters
out of the land of colored birds and butterflies.

We will give back your villages and fields
your small and willing women.

We will leave you your small joys
and smaller troubles.

We will trust you to your gods,
some blind, some many-handed.



Interesting times we live in, I'd say. I wonder if Obama secretly scribbles the occasional verse. Probably not, uh?

TS