September 24, 2005
The website has become a stomach-churning showcase for the
pornography of war -- close-up shots of Iraqi insurgents and civilians
with heads blown off, or with intestines spilling from open wounds.
Sometimes photographs of mangled body parts are displayed: Part of the
game is for users to guess what appendage or organ is on display . . .A
series of photos showing two men slumped over in a pickup truck, with
nothing visible above their shoulders except a red mass of brain matter
and bone, is described as "an Iraqi driver and passenger that tried to
run a checkpoint during the first part of OIF." The post goes on to say
that "the bad thing about shooting them is that we have to clean it
up." Another post, labeled "dead shopkeeper in Iraq," does not explain
how the subject of the photo ended up with a large bullet hole in his
back but offers the quip "I guess he had some unsatisfied customers."
The Nation
The Porn of War
September 22, 2005
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films.
One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in
the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat
man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him
wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through
the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round
him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in
the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a
lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was
a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with
a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming
with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying
to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and
comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time
covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could
keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in
among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then
there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up
into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed
it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman
down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss
and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they
didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police
turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her
nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction . . .George Orwell
1984
1948
I didn't go to the big anti-war demo in Washington today -- and not
just because I have the normal responsibilities of a middle-aged parent
with a house, a mortgage, a dog and a backyard that badly needs mowing.
I could have evaded all of those things. I decided not to go because up
I've been deeply conflicted about the morality of supporting a rapid
U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.
That is, up until now.
I opposed the invasion of Iraq -- from the moment, in the summer of
2002, when it became obvious Bush had made up his mind to overthrow
Saddam's regime. It didn't take a degree in Middle Eastern studies to
understand what a Pandora's box of sectarian conflict and strategic
instability Shrub was about to open, and you didn't need to be a
pacifist to see that the moral and legal case for war was deficient to
the point of criminality.
It's also been clear -- since about, oh, four days after the fall of
Baghdad -- that the Cheney administration didn't have (still doesn't
have) any coherent strategy for stabilizing, pacifying or
reconstructing Iraq, other than to pour money down Halliburton's
gullet. And while the campaign to export "democracy" to Iraq was
sincere (at least on the part of many of those who participated)
it was always doomed, as much by the deficiencies of democracy here in
America as by the cultural and historical tragedies of Iraq.
So I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, an apologist for the
war, much less for the admininstration or -- for that matter -- the
American people, who followed their leaders into an aggressive war with
barely a peep of protest. I'm also not some born-again hawk, who's
suddenly discovered that the war was a noble cause after all, now that
it's opened the floodgates of Iraq to the kind of fanatical terrorists
the ever clueless American public thought we were going to fight in the first place.
The truth is, I don't give a tinker's damn about the war on
terrorism any more -- not when it's set next to the agony the war in
Iraq is inflicting on the people of Iraq. The American people chose
this war, and whether it was out of ignorance, fear, or a blind,
hysterical patriotism is really beside the point. In a democracy (even
one as puerile and corrupt as ours) people get the kind of government
they deserve. And so the American people deserve the
consequences of failure in Iraq -- whether it's another 2,000 dead
soldiers, or $10 a gallon gas, or the transformation of the Sunni
Triangle into the world's biggest terrorist training camp. We''ve
earned them all, the hard way.
So if the only risk was that withdrawal would make America less
secure -- say by exposing the precious U.S. homeland to blowback from
an Al Qaeda revival in Iraq or the collapse of the House of Saud -- I
guess I'd be down in Washington yelling bring the troops home now, and to hell with the consequences. America has no right to use Iraq as the bait in Field Marshal von Rumsfeld's "flypaper" strategy.
(There is, of course, a cold-blooded strategic argument
to be made for a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, in which case the military
justification for continuing the war is as questionable as the moral
one. In that sense, I'm actually giving the hawks the benefit of the
doubt.)
For me, the overriding moral question for me is this: Would a U.S. withdrawal make things better or worse for the Iraqi people?
My personal opinion is that having started the war, and uncorked the
bottle of religious fanaticism and communal savagery, America is
morally obliged to do whatever it can to minimize the suffering and
death its actions have caused -- and will continue to cause for years
to come.
To do otherwise would be (to recyle an analogy
from an earlier post) treating the Iraqis like a small boy who mixes a
bunch of red ants and blacks together to watch them fight, then gets
bored with the whole thing and flushes them all down the toilet.
Like Juan Cole,
I have a strong suspicion that at this point a complete U.S. withdrawal
from Iraq could be the starting gun (so to speak) for a more
conventional civil war, one fought by battalions or even divisions,
instead of death squads and suicide bombers. This would probably lead
to ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, the collapse of anything even
resembling a central goverrnment, and the crippling of what little is
left of Iraq's public infrastructure -- schools, hospitals, power
stations, waterworks, etc.
Given the chaos and destruction Iraq has already experienced, the
result could resemble Somalia more than Lebanon. But Iraq's highly
urbanized population would in some ways be even more vulnerable to the
horrors of civil war. Literally millions of people could die, or be
brutalized, or turned into homeless refugees.
I've read and considered the views of those
who argue the American occupation is provoking, not restraining the
march towards civil war, and that a U.S. withdrawal would lead to a
reduction in violence, not an explosion of it. But to me, those
arguments have always had a wiff of rationalization about them -- of
ducking the hard moral choices involved.
Some withdrawal advocates simply want to see American soldiers taken
out of harm's way, and are indifferent to Iraq's future, which they
believe was never our business to begin with. Others are trying to fit
the war into an ideological template they've cherished since Vietnam,
in which the U.S. is always the imperialist aggressor and the
insurgents are always the people's champions. Still others don't want
to admit that a neo-colonial occupation could ever be the better
alternative (or the least worst one, anyway) even for a fragmented
Third World nation on the brink of civil war. Most, I suspect, are
simply trying to find a path out of the swamp, and are picking and
choosing the arguments that look like they might get us there without
too many more deaths on our conscience.
As for me, I've largely kept silent on the issue -- in part because
I've been so conflicted about it, and in part because (I'm trying to be
honest here) I've been reluctant to buck the overwhelming anti-war,
pro-withdrawal sentiment on my side of the political fence, or give
even the slightest aid and comfort to the war hawks on the other side.
It's not that anyone should give a shit about what I think, but I've
had enough experience with being selectively misquoted by right-wing
bloggers to know how even a carefully worded argument against immediate
withdrawal might be played -- i.e. "lefty blogger admits Bush was right
all along."
Still, I haven't felt right about avoiding the issue. So I've been
promising myself for a while now that I would break cover and at least
admit that I'm not sure withdrawing from Iraq is the morally right
thing to do, and have deep doubts about the arguments in favor of it.
But something happened on my way to a confession: I came across the Nation article on nonwthatsfuckedup.com,
which meant I had to take a good, hard look at the psychopathic side of
the American spirit, and consider its implications not just for the war
on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, but its role in the emergence
of an authentically fascist movement in American politics, one which
feeds on violence and the glorification of violence, and which has
found an audience not just in the U.S. military (where I think -- or at
least hope -- it's still a relatively small fringe) but in the culture
as a whole.
I don't have time at the moment to explain fully why and how this
peek at the banality of evil changed my thinking, although I'll try to
cover it in a future post. Suffice it to say that my visit to
nowthatsfuckedup.com was a reminder of the genocidal skeletons hanging
in the American closet. It left me with the conviction -- or at least
an intuitive suspicion -- that an open-ended war in Iraq (or in the
broader Islamic world) will bring nothing but misery and death to them,
and creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism to us.
We have to get out -- not because withdrawal will head off civil war
in Iraq or keep the country from fallling under Iran's control (it
won't) but because the only way we can stop those things from happening
is by killing people on a massive scale, probably even more massive
than the tragedy we supposedly would be trying to prevent.
Defeat, in other words, isn't the only alternative to failure. It
could also lead to the kind of warfare that CIA counterinsurgency
specialist Michael Scheuer warned about in his book Imperial Hubris:
Progress will be measured by the pace of killing and, yes,
by body counts. Not the fatuous body counts of Vietnam, but precise
counts that will run to extremely large numbers. The piles of dead will
include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies
wear no uniforms.Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat
our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of
infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants,
and crops in the field; fertile plants and grain mills -- all these and
more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land
mines, moreoever, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and
mountain passes too long, high, or numerous to close with U.S.
soldiers, As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties,
displaced populations, and refugees.
Again, this sort of
bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will
remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed
policies toward the Muslim world.
There was a time when I would have argued that the American people
couldn't stomach that kind of butchery -- not for long anyway -- even
if their political leaders were willing to inflict it. But now I'm not
so sure. As a nation, we may be so desensitized to violence, and so
inured to mechanized carnage on a grand scale, that we're
psychologically capable of tolerating genocidal warfare against any one
who can successfully be labeled as a "terrorist." Or at least, a
sizable enough fraction of the America public may be willing to
tolerate it, or applaud it, to make the costs politically bearable.
I don't know this for a fact, but after a stroll through
nowthatsfuckedup.com, or reading the genocidal lunacy routinely on
display at Little Green Footballs or freerepublic.com - or your average
redneck watering hole for that matter -- I'm not willing to rule it out.
Which means I should have gone to Washington today after all.
Because we really do need to get the troops out of Iraq -- before hell is the consequence.