Tariq Ali is a novelist, lecturer, filmmaker, broadcaster, revolutionary and polemicist with a refined British accent. Based in the UK, he is editor of the New Left Review and author of more than a dozen political/historical books including the best-selling The Clash of Fundamentalisms and his latest, Bush in Babylon, both published by Verso and both of which confront American Empire and its unprecedented concentration of power.

Ali has been an activist for almost half a century. During the ‘60s, the Pakistani-born student was sent to Vietnam to gather information for a war crimes tribunal planned by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. He was the inspiration for the Rolling Stones song "Street Fighting Man" and John Lennon’s "Power to the People." I interviewed him by phone at his home in London in March 2004.

Deborah Campbell: You’ve argued that the American Empire has two legs—the Washington consensus with its economic institutions and the US military as the enforcer. Is American imperialism then a form of corporate imperialism?

Tariq Ali: It takes various forms but all imperialism historically over the 19th and 20th century has been corporate imperialism. If you look at how European imperialisms began, you had the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company and these companies, i.e. corporations, were actually given charters by parliament to raise their own private armies so they could defend their trading interests. So empires have always had these corporate interests and this is carried on. Of course now the situation has changed in that companies don’t have their own armies as such, but the states in which these companies function give them armies. It’s very interesting, there’s a very celebrated Marine general called Smedley Butler who wrote a book called War is a Racket, and in this book which I quote in my own book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, he describes all the countries the Marines were asked to invade. And he names the companies on whose behalf they went in, and he compares the US Marines to the mafia, saying we were enforcers. We were basically going in to take the Central American countries on behalf of giant US corporations. So it’s an old history. However one has to understand that that’s a very important part of it but it’s not the only part. The other thing which empires do is to try and keep themselves powerful and hegemonic as long as they can, and when that begins to crash they realize it’s the end of privilege. And the United States right now is in a unique situation, in that it’s the only empire in the world. We haven’t ever had such a situation since the world began. You’ve always had rival empires jostling for power and space. This is the first time there is only a single empire and I think the wars they have been waging over the past ten to twenty years are wars to reassert their hegemony, especially after the fall of Communism when there is no official enemy left. Then it became a problem: how to preserve the military-industrial complex in the United States, how to justify it. And they began to justify it by saying we have to maintain our position in the world, which is today the formal official position in the United States.

DC: Is it a case where previously they had the Soviet Union as a natural enemy, and now they need to construct one?

TA: They need to construct an enemy because it’s difficult for them, given how they’ve educated their own public opinion, to say that other countries which also believe in capitalism are enemies. They’re rivals, not enemies. In reality, though, they see many of them as enemies, but it’s much better to have an enemy which can be projected on the screen as alien, barbaric, trying to blow up the United States, possibly could unleash nuclear weapons inside the United States. This sort of horrendous propaganda campaign currently underway, which was used to justify the war on Iraq. The backlash of that is beginning to effect both Bush and his close ally Tony Blair in Britain because they lied. They lied through their teeth to get a skeptical public opinion to wage war. The marketing techniques—this is what has happened to official politics, that they need to market it—and the media plays an absolutely crucial role in the marketing of these threats in order to justify war.

DC: Given the long history of US military interventions, the American public seems surprisingly unaware of that history. Do you think that kind of ignorance is deliberate?

TA: I think it is deliberate and I think it’s fostered by the kind of political culture in which we live today. not just in the United States but in Britain. History as a subject has been devalued, and the way in which history is taught and the way in which history is portrayed is very very carefully orchestrated. So we do not have a real history of the 20th century. The only time you got a bit of that in recent years is through an alternative movie, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. In the course of that movie he gave a five or six minute rap on what has been happening in the rest of the world and what the United States has been responsible for. And I think young people who went to see that in the theaters—it was never screened on television—were completely stunned by that, which is an incredible indictment of the education system. They don’t teach any of that stuff, except at expensive universities. This history isn’t going to go away because it’s real. There is where alternatives to the existing media networks are extremely important.

DC: We have a situation right now where the Big Six media corporations control most of the information flow. What is the state of journalism right now?

TA: I think essentially since the collapse of Communism, they’ve decided that the way in which democracy is if nothing is seriously challenged. You have center left and center right governments totally constrained by the needs of the Washington consensus to operate in exactly the same way. This then debases democracy. And if the media, too, is being neutered, and it is—it has been corporatized—then you have very little avenue for real dissent. Of course you say this to a mainstream politician and he will say, "we are free countries, you can fight an election." But how can you fight an election when you have the media totally dominated by corporate interests now and the only independent public sector, public service media—the BBC in Britain, ABC in Australia, CBC in Canada—is constantly under attack? They’ve been told not to put out programs which are too questioning. And in Britain we’ve seen this happening in recent months where Tony Blair has ordered the sacking of the two senior-most BBC executives because he didn’t like their coverage of the war. And if this is happening in public sector television, you can imagine what happens in the private sector. They’ve become by and large propaganda channels. So it’s a strange but not totally surprising irony that the existence of communism and that whole world compelled the capitalist world to permit a media that was questioning, critical and gave space to dissident voices. But the collapse of the communist enemy has meant that they feel they don’t need to do this any longer. Why should they bother? So they don’t.

DC: I think journalists feel they are under siege at this moment.

TA: The journalists are under siege. The new word they coined for the journalists who covered the war with the army—embedded journalists—is a very accurate one. The point is they are embedded even in peacetime, because the media has become so important in terms of conveying politics to people. Most politicians don’t go and talk directly with people any longer, it’s done through the television networks. So how the television networks operate becomes absolutely critical.

DC: You often hear it said that newspapers, journalists, write the first drafts of history. So is there a danger that a hundred years from now, or even twenty, that students are going to be reading a history that is grossly inaccurate?

TA: I think this is absolutely true. Fortunately you have a few voices in the media who do provide a more objective account, but their numbers are limited, and increasingly they are being sidelined. And most people unfortunately do not read newspapers in the Western world; they watch television. Most, we are talking about millions of people, get their views or they decide on what to think after they’ve seen the main television news. So how that is presented becomes absolutely key, and that is incredibly biased.

DC: Coming to the situation in Iraq, that being the military intervention all eyes are on at the moment, you had a very confident American administration going into Iraq. They thought it was going to be a cakewalk. It seems now there wasn’t a lot of planning for what would follow the victory celebration.

TA: Not just was there no planning, but basically some of us tried to warn them that what you’re invading isn’t a Balkan principality but a sovereign independent Arab country with a population that may dislike its own leader intensely, even loathe him, but this is a country with a historical memory, unlike Western countries at the moment. And this memory is very hostile to occupation and imperialism. They wouldn’t believe us. They were therefor totally taken by surprise at the scale of the resistance. And this is only beginning. It’s just the first year of the occupation.

DC: When you look at the main planners behind the war in Iraq, you see a lot of the neoconservatives being particularly active on that count. These are fairly smart guys. They’ve got Ph.Ds. Why did they get it so wrong?

TA: I think because they believed what they wanted to believe. And incidentally, while in the United States it’s neoconservatives, in Britain the war planners were Labour. We should never forget that. Blair was heavily involved with this war right from the beginning. Bush took him into confidence and Blair began to plan how he would deceive his own country and his citizens in order to go to war. And the British establishment was very divided on this, which is why he is very unpopular, but that’s just by the by. The reason why the planners were taken aback by the resistance was because they preferred to believe the house Arabs, the Arabs who work for the State Department in different guises and capacities, as academics or consultants. And these house Arabs— Fouad Ajami, Kanan Makiya, and others—basically told them—they actually said this—"You will be welcomed with sweets and flowers. People are waiting for you." And there were no sweets and no flowers, not even in the southern part of Iraq which is very hostile to Saddam.

DC: So even at the pinnacle of power you still believe what you’re told, just like the masses.

TA: It is quite incredible. They wanted to hear that and the house Arabs actually told them that, because they knew they wanted to believe it.

DC: It seems in some ways like it was a faith-based initiative.

TA: It was a secular faith. From that point of view it was very fundamentalist. And once they decided to go to war, no other point of view was tolerated. From that point of view Paul O’Neill’s book written by Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, was incredibly revealing: how they function, what their mindset is. What disgusted him was not so much that he disagreed with them, but the fact that they were totally dogmatic. And the picture O’Neill paints of this administration reminds you of a Soviet politburo under Breschnev. They take decisions and then they will not listen to any countervailing opinion. That’s what frightened O’Neill.

DC: So he was an agnostic facing the true believers.

TA: He was an agnostic on Iraq, and he said that one of the things we’ve always had at the highest levels of government in the United States is you always find people with the opposite view to come and present it, so you can form a balanced judgement. Finally, you do what you’re going to, but you must listen to opposing views. And he said that it was very noticeable that the Bush-Cheney-Wolfowitz gang was just not interested. It’s very revealing because it comes from one of them. He’s the Treasury Secretary in the Bush government—he’s telling us this.

DC: With all the fear of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, it seems that the US is nevertheless targeting secular governments, whether opposing Arafat in the Palestinian Authority…

TA: …or Saddam Hussein, or now Aristide in Haiti.

DC: And Syria as well. Why are they going after the seculars when their great fear is Islamic fundamentalism?

TA: I don’t think that is their great fear. I think this is something they use nonstop. Basically their great fear is governments which they don’t control, whatever these governments are. And governments which don’t do their bidding. And this is what they are trying to put a stop to. They’ve never been hostile to religious governments per se. if you look at their links with Saudi Arabia for nearly 50 years now, this is the most religious government in the Arab world based on a virulent little sectarian Islamic group, the Wahhabis. It’s as if a hard-core Protestant fundamentalist group had seized power in a country. That’s what it’s like. I know sometimes it looks like that’s what happened in the United States but it’s not as simple as that. And so they basically, in fact often, they prefer to deal with religious groups and the military, because they feel these are people they can do business with. Osama bin Laden has become a sort of fly in the ointment who’s wrecked that for a time. But they are happily negotiating with the Shia’s of Iran and in Iraq at the moment.

DC: You often hear that even at the moment, that the world is much better off without Saddam Hussein. Do you think that is the case?

TA: Well I honestly don’t think that is the case. Saddam Hussein was threatening no one. Over the last ten years, the repression in Iraq declined considerably. The time when Saddam Hussein was a real threat was when he was an ally of the West. That’s when he was really dangerous. But subsequently in the mid to late 90s, he wasn’t at all. Obviously it’s a good thing if you have democracy and people are responsible for their own government, but the notion that this was a leader who was so threatening he had to be removed by force is the only thing they can now say, because all their other arguments have been shown to be total fiction. So this is the thing they will say. And they are trying to rig up a trial like a Nuremberg trial to show, look, these are the evil things he did, this is why we are justified.

If Saddam Hussein has an ounce of sense left in his head, he will insist that his lawyers summon senior Western leaders who were his allies for a long time. I think they want to have a show trial but the Iraqi puppets the United States has imposed, the [Achmed] Chalabi family, are the ones who want to organize it and they will probably not allow a proper trial to take place. Because how can you have a proper trial without Western politicians being summoned? Rumsfeld in particular, but not just him: British, American civil servants, State Department officials, ambassadors, diplomats, who dealt with Saddam at a time when his repression was at his peak.

DC: To take another tack with the situation in Iraq, we live in a dangerous world and sometimes you need to use force and sometimes the world may need to have some policing. What do you think about that?

TA: I think that the policing carried about by big powers is never policing carried out in the interests of the world as such, it’s always policing which is carried out to service their own interest. I can’t think of a single occasion in recent decades when they’ve done anything which has been in the interests of the world as a whole. The interventions in the ‘90s, which were called "humanitarian," have produced essentially a total mess both in Bosnia and in Kosovo. All that could have been stopped by the European Union—here the Europeans are just as responsible. The Yugoslav thing was an ugly civil war in which most sides behaved pretty badly, but there was a real genocide taking place at the time in Rwanda, which was totally ignored by the West. They just let it happen. If there was any time for a United Nations, multilateral intervention to stop a real genocide—which I favor incidentally—that was the time.

DC: There seems to be very little information about the real interests in Haiti at this time.

TA: I think essentially what’s going on in Haiti is that we’ve had a coup d’etat carried out in a very painful way and the elected president has been pushed out of office by pressure from the United States and France, and the threat accompanied by sending troops and the threat of a bloodbath. They’ve never liked Aristide. The United States stopped him from dealing with the remnants of the old dictatorship and their army. He wasn’t allowed to deal with them. They toppled him once. Clinton said this is unacceptable and they sent him back. And the same forces have now toppled him again. Now I’m not saying Aristide was perfect. For god’s sake he was working under the constraints of the Washington consensus. Though to be fair to him he didn’t go along with everything they wanted. And for that they decided he’d got to be got rid of, and they did it from within the Bush Administration. It’s interesting the John Kerry has come out against it. It’s the first time the Democrats have taken a contrary position on foreign policy as it’s happening, not after the event. And the reason they’ve had is that they know exactly what’s going on. [The situation in Haiti] is not going to create stability, it’s going to create an incredibly repressive regime.

DC: Moving back to Iraq, the occupation is supposed to end on June 30 when the American authorities have said they plan to hand sovereignty back to the Iraqi people. Do you think that will happen?

TA: No. They will hand over to the Council which they dominate and where they have put their own people to a considerable extent. So the notion that this will be any sort of democracy is of course a total joke. They’ve replaced a regime hostile to them with a regime friendly to them. But if they think this is going to be stable, they must be crazy. I think it’s a cynical ploy basically to show the American population in the run-up to the US election that, look, we’ve done what we came to do and we’re pulling out. But they won’t be pulling out at all. They will have military bases in Iraq that will make sure the regime in power does what they say. And if you have elections in Iraq, I’m prepared to predict these things will happen. One, that any elected assembly will not have most of these puppets sent from Washington with it, unless the elections are rigged. Which the British used to do when they ran Iraq—I guess these guys could do it also. Second, even if they manage to rig elections and have their own people in, the bulk of those elected will want all foreign troops out, will want Iraqi control of Iraqi oil, and it’s not totally impossible that they might insist on close and friendly relations and possibly a security pact with Iran. Iran and Iraq, if they got close to each other, would make a very powerful bloc, economically, politically, militarily. And the United States will move heaven and earth to stop that.

DC: There’s been talk lately about the Greater Middle East and "planting the seeds of democracy." What is going on here?

TA: I think it has very little to do with democracy and everything to do with maintaining control over the world’s largest zone of cheap oil. Not just because it’s needed for the United States, but if the United States through its military bases and pliant politicians controls the oil, they can then determine at what price it’s sold and to whom. And given that their big rivals are not in the Middle East or Europe but their real economic rivals are in the Far East—China, Japan and potentially the Korean peninsula. All are without oil, they have no resources of their own, so they are heavily dependent on oil, and if that oil is controlled by the United States, then it gives them enormous power over the economies of these regimes.

DC: But doesn’t the Middle East need a dose of democracy?

TA: It certainly does. The question is, why hasn’t it had it till now? Most people you talk to in Egypt and Saudi Arabia were desperate for democracy. These are the countries which are controlled by the US. Why didn’t they make them into showcases for democracy? Why did Iraq have to be invaded? I’m in favor of democracy in all these Middle Eastern countries, but you would get regimes in many cases which the US wouldn’t like. [Samuel] Huntington calls this the democratic paradox, i.e., that if you have democracy you might get regimes that are hostile to the United States, which happened of course in Iran in the ‘50s and the CIA and British intelligence had to remove the democratically elected regime and get the king back on the throne. That’s the problem they confront because the oil makes this part of the world absolutely crucial so they need tame regimes and democracy can sometimes produce the opposite. The point I’m making is that deep down and not so deep down they prefer to deal with oligarchies and monarchies and the military which can sustain these countries.

Democracy is the bludgeon used to destroy the communist enemy and since the collapse of that enemy democracy itself has become very weak and increasingly, in all the advanced capitalist states, there is heavy pressure on democratic space and increasingly the politician compete with each other for the same economic space.

DC: In the US for instance you see that both the Democratic and the Republican candidates are part of the same fraternity at Yale.

TA: Exactly. The United States is the most grotesque example of a functioning democracy. It’s not just that they belong all to the same elite, the people who win from both political parties, but you need an enormous amount of money to even compete in these elections. But we know that about the United States, but Europe and Canada used to be different. Even in these countries now we are watching the inexorable laws of the Washington consensus coming into operation. So if you challenge privatization or the role of the market, you’re looked at as crazy, whereas these challenges were looked at as the common sense of the age immediately after the Second World War. There has been a massive shift to the right in these countries and that is actually beginning to threaten the functioning of democracy itself.

DC: We’re in advanced capitalism at this moment and things feel very unstable, much more than three years ago. What’s the next stage?

TA: I think 9/11 will be seen as a footnote in history, but it brought all these things to the fore. It’s not as if these things weren’t there. If you look at Suskind’s book, Paul O’Neill reveals that the Bush Administration was looking to attack Iraq two weeks after coming to power, long before 9/11. They were determined to take Iraq. They were discussing all these things, the National Strategy Doctrine had been discussed even before Bush came in. The New American Century Project was an old conservative project in the United States. 9/11 enabled them to move forward on all fronts very quickly and I think we have essentially a very unbalanced situation in the world where the US wants to preserve its own interests and its own power at all costs and is prepared to ride roughshod over the whole world. The big difference between Bush and Kerry is that Kerry will come back if he wins and put some clothes on the empire, saying uh-oh, we’ve been naked for far too long. Let’s cover up a few things and make our other allies happy and try to move in concert with them. That will work for a short time. Basically they are contradictions now between the interests of the United States and the rest of the world.

DC: What do you see as the biggest threat to American Empire at this point?

TA: I don’t think there’s a big threat to it at the moment. I think both the armed and unarmed resistance in Iraq are showing that there are limitations. You have the military technology and media support to go and bomb any country in the world from the air, but once you occupy a country you become vulnerable yourself. That’s what we are seeing here.

DC: What is the role of Israel in all this?

TA: The role of Israel is that it’s seen by the United States as one of its central props and relays in that region. That’s the reason they attach a lot of importance to it, because they know the Israeli army is the fourth largest in the world and can be used and has been used in the past to defend imperial interest, both by the British in 1956 and by the US in 1967. So that’s the reason for the closeness to Israel, not anything to do with the Judeocide of the Second World War. But the fact is that Israel is seen in the Arab world as a colonial settler state—it occupies parts of Palestine, it gets away with murder, regularly, and the conscience of the West is blind to Palestinian suffering. All these human rights professors, [Michael] Ignatieff and company, rarely speak on the Palestinian question. But in the Arab world and the rest of the world, this is a very important question and if the American government had been genuine about trying to calm things down in the Arab world they would have put real pressure on Israel to pull back to the 1967 frontiers. But they didn’t do that. Instead Ariel Sharon became a valued ally and received uncritical support from the Bush Administration and now John Kerry has come out and down exactly the same. So one is tired of telling them that as long as this occupation continues, even before you’d added another occupation by taking Iraq, there will be no peace in that region, and increasingly desperate and embittered young people will try to score hits elsewhere in the world. So this so-called war on terror has become something which concretely promotes terror.

DC: Do you think peace is the goal of those in charge?

TA: No, the goal is control and occupation, but of course the population doesn’t know that. They think we are doing this to protect the United States, which is crazy.

DC: We have this paradigm now where security is paramount, so part of this is context—whether we talk about security or we talk about human rights, we end up telling very different stories. Is this where the media plays a role?

TA: This is where the media plays a very big role. Basically one of the roles of [the talk about] security is to try and seal off dissent. They tried to do that after 9/11 but it failed, thank god. On February 15, 2003, millions came out—a million in New York—which is a terrible failure for a government and its allies, trying to say this is all about the "war against terror." Now they are putting on more pressure, not just in the United States but in Britain, saying we can lock people up without trial or lawyers, we don’t have to tell you anything. But what they are doing in the name of national security is in fact creating within their populations a state of insecurity. That’s what they want to create, to say to people it’s not your problem, don’t think too much about it, we’re defending you and we’re doing it in the only way we can. The fact is that if some crazies want to do something dramatic they will do it, and the real task is to remove the conditions that produce crazies. That’s what they haven’t understood and they’re not the least bit interested in.

DC: You’ve said that the US military is present in 121 of 190 member nations in the UN. What should people be doing?

TA: There is a movement for global justice. People have to link to it a movement saying we don’t want any foreign bases on our soil, we want to be responsible for our own parts of the world and demand that the United States withdraw its bases from all over the world. There’s no reason why there should be bases in Japan or Germany. The Second World War ended a long time ago; the world is completely transformed. The only function of these and other military bases are to preserve US power and I think where people can, they should exercise their democratic rights to demand an end to this. Secondly, and I think this is happening, funnily enough, in the United States more than elsewhere because the situation is so dire, is the creation of alternative media networks. In the US you do have quite an effective network of alternative radio, one of which hosts Amy Goodman’s show Democracy Now! which is probably heard by millions in the US every day. At least something on that level is being done from below encouraging a different view. Of course they don’t have the money, of course it’s impossible to wield the same power, because the corporations aren’t on the side of the righteous. But nevertheless I think these alternatives are very key. It would be awful if we lived in a world that was totally dominated by money, by consumption, by corporations and corporate priorities, a society in which the gloss of the market decided everything. I mean, it does to a very large extent, but thank there are people who do fight it.

DC: Do you have any advice for the Arab world as the idea of the "clash of civilizations" gains ground?

TA: I don’t think this is a clash of civilizations, I think this is essentially a clash of imperial fundamentalisms versus tiny groups of Islamic fundamentalists. My advice for the Arab world is the best way to defeat the US empire is by having a social and a democratic vision which is infinitely superior to that of the empire. That is the only way to defeat it, i.e. creating societies in which you have both more democracy and more social justice than the United States itself.

Deborah Campbell