The United States has played an "immensely destructive role" both in the Middle East and globally since the end of the Cold War, the Palestinian critic and philosopher, Prof Edward Said, has said.
Prof Said was delivering a lecture in Dublin yesterday evening to inaugurate a seminar series organised by the Keough-Notre Dame Centre.
He said he believed the war in Kosovo was not a humanitarian intervention, stressing that the US had done nothing to stop the wholesale killing of the Kurds in Turkey, or genocide in Rwanda, East Timor and elsewhere.
He said the Kosovo war was to extend US dominance, proving its strength by fighting what Henry Kissinger had called "irrational wars." These are wars that "convince your enemy that you're crazy and are willing to do anything, even using an atomic bomb."
Another factor was the need to show the US's ability to fight several regional wars at once. Prof Said said that throughout the war in Kosovo the US forces continued to bomb Iraq every three days.
He said the "greatest single crime," for which President Clinton and Mr Tony Blair should be brought to trial, was the continuing sanctions against Iraq. It was estimated that 6,000 people were dying every month there, largely through malnutrition and lack of medicines.
He said such wars have "the structure of torture - the weapons are chosen by the powerful, the executioner, the interrogator, without any intervention or response on the part of the victim."
The US in the Middle East, he went on, had shown no interest in supporting or encouraging the struggles for democracy that were taking place in conservative, even reactionary, states.
With the consent of its liberal intelligentsia, the US had been transformed from a relatively "carefully managed society for intervention abroad" into a more massive "engine" for such policies.
Prof Said described the malign effects of partition in Palestine, Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. He said that the Western powers' notion of partition - that "communities have to be separated in order for them to coexist" - was being challenged by "vocal arguments for multiculturalism."