In the Red Zone

TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT XI

Fact check alert!

February 11, 2005:  Jonathan Steele, writing in the U.K. Guardian: 

As Iraqis know, the main killers in Iraq are not the insurgents but the Americans. The Iraqi ministry of health's latest statistics show that in the last six months of 2004 they killed almost three times as many people as the insurgents did. On this issue, just as on the elections, TV images usually simplify, if not falsify, the story.

Whoa, wait just a minute Mr. Steele--and while you're at it, bring your editor in here.  The Guardian has made the same mistake the BBC did when it interpreted these figures.  According to the Ministry of Health (and I quote the BBC article)

The figures said that 3,274 people had died in that period, 2,041 of them as the result of "military operations".

The other 1,233 deaths were attributed to "terrorist operations".

On first blush, this looks indeed like that twice (not three times) as many Iraqis have died at the hands of U.S. military operations than by terrorist attacks.  But as the Ministry later clarified, "'military operations'" referred to Iraqis killed by insurgents as well as coalition or Iraqi forces."

This is slip-shod reporting--especially on the Guardian's part because the Beeb's mea culpa ran on February 1.  Don't British reporters read the competition?  Of course, if you want to believe that trigger-happy G.I.s are murdering more Iraqis than fascist insurgents, you'll be willing to believe anything.  Including this breathtakingly obtuse statement from Mr. Steele:

Most [Iraqis] gave mundane reasons for their vote: patriotism, a sense of duty, concern over joblessness and power cuts, and the hope that the election might be a first step towards change.

These are "mundane reasons?"  Patriotism, a sense of duty, hope that a democratic election might bring change to the lives of a long-suffering people?  One imagines that the only motivation for voting that would excite Mr. Steele would be if Iraqis thought they could bring back Saddam Hussein or install an Iranian-style theocracy, thus discrediting the liberation of Iraq and proving anti-war journalists like Mr. Steele were correct all along.

But he's not, and they're not.  And by the way, Mr. Steele--the Beeb apologized for mis-interpreting the Ministry of Health's statistics.  When will you and the Guardian?

COLE SMOKE

Taking a page from Andrew Sullivan and the various honors he bestows upon the fine, foul and foolish, I hereby institute the "Juan Cole 'Oh, Puh-leez' Award," granted in response to some over-the-top, embarrassing, skin-crawl-producing, cringe-making statement reported in the press or online.  And the first winner is, quite naturally, the good Professor himself.

I hesitate to criticize Cole too much, because I find his site "Informed Comment" a valuable source for information about his main field of expertise, the Shia.  (On other issues, he embodies the sad fact that among many academics--Ward Churchill comes to mind here--being "informed" does not necessarily mean "knowing.".)  But on Tuesday he caused a particular shudder of horror to pass through me, like being stuck on a subway stalled between stations as a panhandler launches into a tale of woe.

The back-story here is a little complicated, involving some on-going Internet dispute between Cole and National Review editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg over--well, at this point it doesn't matter.  After accusing Goldberg of a "descent into pathetic lack of humanity," Cole excerpts this paragraph from the NRO stalwart's attack on him: 

Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to [Cole's] when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there's another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I'm all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc. One caveat: Because I don't think it's right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I'll donate the money to the USO. He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is.

After which Cole rises up in high dudgeon, crying foul to the heavens: 

I cannot tell you how this paragraph hit me in the gut. I was nearly immobilized by disgust and grief. This man really does see Iraqis as playthings. He is proposing a wager on the backs of Iraqis. Millions of Iraqis are going through winter with insufficient heating oil. They are jobless. The innocent 250,000 Fallujans are homeless. Imagine what $1000 means to them. And here we have an prominent American media star, a man who sets opinion on the Sunday afternoon talking heads shows, betting on them as though they are greyhounds in a race. They are not human beings to him, but political playthings on which to be wagered.

This entire paragraph is an excellent symbol for the entire project of the neo-imperial American Right. They are making their own fortunes with a wager on the fates of others, whom they are treating like ants. Get in their way and they stomp on you. Make an anthill the wrong place and they blow it up.

A UN official offered to bet me in February of 2003 on whether the Bush administration would go to war. I knew that it would. I am still ashamed that I took the bet (though I never sought settlement of the wager). In retrospect it was wrong. But that was an easy one. A bet on what Bush would do. Not a bet on the Iraqi people. I hope they will be all right. I don't have anything riding on their suffering more than they already have, and am shocked at the implication that I do.

A wager on the backs of human beings. Perhaps Mr. Goldberg would like to bring back slavery, as well.

Jeepers, Prof, switch to de-caff.  And when you recover from your "disgust and grief," you might want to review your own site and how well it reflects love and concern for the Iraqi people.  After all, on "Informed Comment," pro-liberation Iraqi bloggers are accused of being CIA agents, the elections are practically dismissed as window-dressing and every terrorist--no, I mean guerrilla, as Cole would have it--attack is given marquis billing, as if their psychopathic bloodlust discredits the liberation of 26 million people.  Whoops, I mean 23.5 million--because according to Cole's Wednesday post, 2.5 million Iraqis support the "resistance." 

Well, I thank Cole for revealing his gut-level concern for the Iraqi people--yes, we neo-imperialists also hope they will be "all right."  ("All right?") My question to the Professor is, which Iraqi people--the fascist thugs he calls the "resistance," or the police, National Guardsmen, politicians, everyday people and eight million voters who comprise the true Iraqi "resistance?"   We await his Informed Comment.

TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT II

January 3:  From the New York Sun, novelist Nidra Poller interviews George Malbrunot, one of two French journalists captured by Iraqi Salafists on August 20 and released on December 22. 

Poller:  Would you call the people who were holding you insurgents or résistants?

Malbrunot:  For us it is clear:  People who combat an illegal occupation that results from an illegal war are résistants.  Resistance is a sacred right, whether you are Islamist or nationalist, you are résistants.  However, when you capture people from a country that has nothing to do with the situation, then your methods have nothing to do with the resistance...Taking hostages is a method of terrorism.

In other words, as long as paramilitary death-squads murder innocent Iraqis, they are "resistance fighters."  But should they make the la grande erreur and kidnap a Frenchman, they become...terrorists. 

Later in the interview, Malbrunot inveighs against France's ban on the head scarves, claiming that it will--sacre Dieu!--stir up anti-French sentiment among the Salafists..

When you're dealing with people like Al Qaeda, you mustn't give them angles of attack.  They feed on the shock of cultures...

When we told [our] jihadist [captor] that we are against that law, we think it should have been handled by dialogue, he said, "What dialogue, the head scarf is an obligation for Muslims, there can't be any dialogue."  So you can see there are limits to dialogue...but all the more reason not to give them an opportunity to take action.

Can we say the word "appeasement"?

VOICES FROM IRAQ

Naseer Flayih Hasan is a brilliant Iraqi poet, Chess master and philospher whose insights into his tortured nation did much to form my own opinions.  You can get an idea of his thinking--especially about the anti-war movement--on today's Frontpage Magazine. 

POLITICS OF GRIEF

During the Vietnam War, many activists sought to poison support for the conflict by denouncing veterans as “baby killers,” as if every grunt were one of Kerry’s “Winter Soldiers.”  Like other excess of the time, the taunting of traumatized young men returning from a war zone backfired, tainting the legacy of the anti-war movement.

How well they’ve learned.  Today, many opposed to the war in Iraq adopt the opposite approach—they “support” our troops, remind us of the sacrifices made by our fighting men and women.  The mainstream media keeps a running tally of fatalities (with a morose fascination of the 1000^th death), ABC News’ Nightline recites the names of the dead, while Michael Moore sells books comprised of correspondence from soldiers who feel betrayed by Bush.  It is an effective tactic, one that tries to set the Right’s support for the war in conflict with its propensity to lionize America’s warriors.  And depending on the context, it can be sincere, meaningful or—too often—deeply cynical.

This photograph shows a young woman holding her five month old baby.  The father of that child has never seen his daughter, nor will he.  Last April, First Lt. Doyle Hufstedler, 25, of Abilene, Texas, died when an IED near Habbaniyah destroyed his vehicle.  The photograph illustrated a recent Scripps Howard News Service story highlighting the fact that 900 children have lost a parent in our current conflict, including six mothers, leaving behind 10 children.  As we look at the joy on Leslie Hufstedler’s face, we admire her courage—grateful that it relieves us of experiencing the true depth of her pain. 

What the image doesn’t—and can’t—convey is why her husband died, for what purpose.  Photography—the visual media in general—is ill-suited for conveying the abstract thoughts and concepts that provide context for images.  The once-living soldier’s face, the flag-draped coffin, the brave war widow make us feel profound worlds of grief, but beyond that grief there is no narrative, no meaning.  Like a fetish, the image constantly returns attention to itself.

Opponents of the war know this.  They seek to decouple the conflict in Iraq from a larger narrative that might provide meaning to soldiers’ deaths.  Lacking their own narrative (during Vietnam, they claimed participation in global anti-imperialism; today, they are reduced to “No Blood for Oil”), they focus on images of sorrow and loss with accusatory, prosecutorial, intent.  See?  These are the costs of your war.  They are right, of course.  And thousands of grieving Americans, for whom no concept of duty or pro patria or “democratizing the Middle East” justifies their loss, agree.

And yet I wonder what effect the Left’s politicization of grief will have on our soldiers and, more importantly, suffering families.  Politics are by nature one-sided, and to use America’s sorrow as an attack on the Bush Administration is to transform that sorrow into an instrument of outrage.  When the guns fall silent, and the protesters move to other causes, outrage, too, fades away.  Leaving the bereaved with--what?

The Gettysburg Address, Sir Edward Lutyens’ monument at Ypres, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial at Washington did not seek to diminish the war which claimed so many lives.  Instead, they sought to represent the tragedy of the soldiers' sacrifice, and in so doing connect us with something profound and deep in the human soul.  Political outrage, in contrast, reduces that connection to sloganeering.  When, after the Iraq War is over, we revisit Fahrenheit 9-11, will we still feel the anguish of Lila Lipscomb—the Bush supporter whose son was killed in Iraq—or will her grief seem tarnished, cheapened by the filmmaker's mendacious agenda? 

I have no real problems with the Scripps article, or with its use of Laurie Hufstedler’s photograph.  (The “People” magazine-ation of this war, however, is troubling). Rather, I have difficulties with what the website Daily Kos did with it.  “Another facet of Bush’s legacy,” Markos Moulitsas Zuniga posted over a link to the article and photographs accompanying it.  Yes, yes, j’accuse.  But the photograph is more than that.  It represents a widow's sorrow, softened by the promise of continued life.  To reduce that image to ideology is parochial, crude.  Zuniga’s lapse, of course, is minor (Michael Moore’s less so) and yet it represents, I think, the effects of much of the Left’s ”concern” for the troops:  tragedy exploited for political ends, grief diminished by ideology. 

Doyle Hufstedler died in a war that many of the people reading these words support:  To us, his death is honorable and tragic—and, because of that honor and tragedy, meaningful.  It is important that we keep these notions of honor and meaning alive in our thoughts and the in public discourse.  As Lincoln articulated in the Gettysburg address, how we judge a war’s purpose, in the end, determines whether we view our soldiers’ sacrifices as tragic and meaningful—or wasted and outrageous. 

UPDATE:  Blackfive lets us know the kind of response our soldiers are receiving today.  Indeed, this is not Vietnam.

THE EMPIRE AND LAURIE BRAND

Those of us for whom college means fading memories of all-night study crams and Hendrix jams often puzzle at the attitudes of many academics toward the war.  The U.S. is fighting an enemy whose goals are antithetical to ideals embraced by most intellectuals, yet many express hostility to America (there are exceptions, see "Books to Baghdad" below).  Last November, a window opened on this mindset, thanks to Laurie Brand's address to the Middle East Studies Association, a self-described "non-political" group comprised of academics from prestigious universities and institutions around the world.

As deftly profiled by Martin Kramer's Sandstorm, out-going MESA president Brand is a well-credentialed professor of international relations at USC, an expert on Palestinian issues and a strident critic of America.  That's the same America, Sandstorm notes, that has awarded the good professor numerous career-enhancing grants, awards, state-sponsored lecture tours and four  Fulbright scholarships.

Speaking, appropriately enough, in San Francisco, Brand entitled her address "Scholarship in the Shadow of Empire."  Her ostensible subject was the undeniably important issue of how the U.S. government "uses academic/scientific inquiry," especially during wartime.  "How should we define the concept of citizen/scholar?" she queried.  As her talk progressed, however, she grew increasingly bitter toward the U.S., eventually warning that "academic freedom...is under siege by those insisting that we toe a particular ideological or political line."  She offered no examples of actual coercion or threats.

We'll pass over her denunciations of the "deplorable" conflict in Iraq and the "Manichean" war on terror.  What's more interesting is her constant description of the U.S. as "the empire."  "What else but 'empire' describes the awesome thing America is becoming?" she quotes a friend; "What should our relationship as scholars be to the state, now the empire?" she asks.  Of course, she and her MESA audience know what "empire" means--not a Rome-like defender of civilization against tribal barbarians, but (queue the Darth Vader theme) an evil empire that persecutes the pure of heart and righteous of soul.

Brand's address reveals her own Manichean world-view, similar to that reflected by many intellectuals.  They view "academic/scientific" knowledge as something pure that must be protected from--not offered in assistance to--the profane necessities of government.  ("Studies of democratization, political Islam and terrorism serve as the...intellectual underpinning of the newest march to battle," cautions Brand.)  Moreover, as guardians of knowledge, these scholar-priests must maintain the moral high ground by declining participation in the often queasy compromises of real world politics.  To her credit, Brand admits that accepting taxpayer money "implicates" academics in the "broader imperial/political system"--but her mea culpa rings false, betrayed by the fact that, in her lexicon, scholars receive benign-sounding "government funding"--but resist "the empire."

Canadian columnist David Warren once described post-modernism as "Christianity without Christ."  In the anti-Americanism evinced by these academics (along with the entertainment/media/political overclass and most, it seems, of continental Europe) one senses what Gibbon critiqued as the early Christian's other-worldliness and disengagement from Rome's responsibilities in the world--but, in today's case, without the moral and ethical anchor of the man Jesus.  Instead, these Leftists exhibit an amorphous, free-floating desire to escape the thorny issues of power and governance in return for clean hands, a tidy conscience and comfortable personal lives.

What explains this self-righteous alienation?  Brand offers a clue.  She quotes a 2002 Ron Susskind interview in which a senior Bush adviser says, "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality...We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."  Continuing on, she notes,

What has become increasingly clear is that it matters little if one has extensive regional, language and political expertise, if one's conclusions do not match those of the administration of the empire.

That's the most galling part, it seems.  To Brand's brand of scholars, the empire is mean, manipulative and coercive.  Even worse--it doesn't care about them.

UPDATE:  Just to put in my two cents worth on the current Juan Cole flap (so glad I'm not alone in my irritation with him!), I should add that while Laurie Brand is the out-going president of MESA, the in-coming is none other than the good professor himself.  Someone might warn the scholars' association that in Cole's case:  being "informed " is not necessarily knowing.

SHADOW OF VIETNAM FALLS OVER PRESS

The New York Times’s John Burns is a reporter without peer, and his lucid, intelligent dispatches from Iraq stand with the best journalism of the conflict.  So it was disappointing to read his above-the-fold front page story in the November 29 edition, "Shadow of Vietnam Falls Over Iraqi River Raids."  Although other observers have since commented on Burns’ article, it’s worth re-examining the manner in which press defeatism infects even routine news stories about the war.

Accompanied by a photograph of Marine river craft churning up the Euphrates—the early morning sun, blazing like a napalm explosion behind a palm grove, furnishes the necessary reference to Apocalypse Now—Burns’ article describes a patrol intended to root out terrorists, test new tactics and train Iraqi troops. But as the morning progresses, “images pressed in of another American war,” and “thoughts of Vietnam were hard to avoid.”  The GIs express a “sense” that the insurgents’ Viet Cong-like cunning could “match highly trained troops, technological gadgetry and multi-billion dollar war budgets.”  Burns’ implication is unmistakable:  our soldiers fear a repetition of the catastrophe undergone by an earlier generation.

But wait. In the second graf, he concedes that Vietnam “is rarely mentioned among the American troops.” Indeed, aside from a few jokes, the Marines don’t talk about Vietnam at all.  What proof does Burns offer to show how—or even if –that earlier conflict troubles today’s GIs?  None. Worse, attempting to prove a negative, the journalist asserts that soldiers avoid mentioning Vietnam because it’s considered a “bad talisman” among GIs, “who privately admit to fearing this war could be lost.”

There you have it.  In the space of two grafs, a story about a Euphrates river patrol detours into a claim that unspecified number of soldiers fear we might lose in Iraq—despite the fact that Burns provides no substantiating quotes.  But to the casual reader the message is clear:  Iraq is a mistaken war, a Southeast Asian-like quagmire, in which crafty guerrillas kill American troops sent into a combat zone for no good purpose.  Better get out now.

Truth is hard:  we might lose Iraq.  We have no certainty of success.  Then again, no war comes with unconditional guarantees of victory.  Imagine a reporter describing soldiers’ fears of defeat during the battle for Guadalcanal or the Normandy invasion.  Of course such anxieties existed, but none mentioned them, so as not to demoralize the troops, hinder the war effort and give comfort to the enemy.  Why is Iraq different?  It’s different because, this time, America’s cultural overclass opposes the conflict and seeks a quick exit. They—and we--understand the country will tolerate combat deaths if the cause seems winnable.  Thus, supporters describe Iraq using images evoking hard but victorious conflicts like the Civil War or WWII; opponents choose quagmires like the Philippine insurgency or Vietnam.  One set of references rallies, the other depresses, support.  Depending on which becomes the lens through which we view this war will determine whether we emerge victorious or not.