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SPENGLER
Red harvest in
Iraq
"Plans are
all right sometimes ... And sometimes just stirring
things up is all right - if you're tough enough to
survive, and keep 
your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes
to the top."
The Continental Op is alive and
well, gainfully employed kicking down doors in Tikrit. I
refer to that black sheep of American literature, the
nameless detective of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red
Harvest (1927) whose tactical doctrine is quoted
above. You might run into him now and then, or rather
someone quite like him, in expatriate bars around Asia.
Hollywood embraced all of Hammett's heroes
except for the Op, whose casual destructiveness offends
American sensibilities. Yet Hammett's grubby detective
might be American literature's most original invention,
and, more to the point, he is just the man America needs
right now in Iraq.
We encounter the Op in a
1920s Western town, where the mine boss imported
gangsters to break a strike, and the gangsters stayed to
run the rackets. A brittle truce prevails among the
various gangs, the corrupt police and the mine owner.
The Op willfully incites a gang war, deceiving
colleagues and superiors. He dislikes authority, not
least the one that pays him. Damsels in distress and
downtrodden workers matter to him not at all. He is a
loner without friends, short, fat and alcoholic. His
transient love interest is a demimondaine whose murder
he neglects to prevent. He incites the war simply
because he can, at great risk to his own life, which in
any case he holds cheap. He manipulates rather than
confronts. The story ends when everyone else is dead.
Numerous films borrowed Red Harvest's
plot outline, including Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo,
Sergio Leone's For a Fistful of Dollars, Walter
Hill's Last Man Standing, and the Coen brothers'
Miller's Crossing, without, however, portraying
Hammett's protagonist. That anomaly reveals much about
American culture. The detectives and cowboys who infest
American cinema descend from the silly chivalric
literature that Miguel de Cervantes lampooned in Don
Quixote.
Americans want their tough guys to
have a heart of gold. In the Kurosawa-Leone-Hill
adaptations, the Toshiro Mifune-Clint Eastwood-Bruce
Willis characters take great risk to aid a lady in
distress. Hammett's Op cares neither about lady nor
risk. His object is the mutual destruction of the
contending parties, which he arranges with humor and
enjoyment.
At one point the Op arranges "a peace
conference out of which at least a dozen killings ought
to grow ... pretending I was trying to clear away
everybody's misunderstandings ... and played them like
you'd play trout, and got just as much fun out of it ...
I looked at [the police chief] and knew he hadn't a
chance in a thousand of living another day because of
what I had done to him, and I laughed, and felt warm and
happy inside."
There is no "there" there in
American culture, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland. (What Is American
Culture? Nov 18, 2003). That is true because
America is not a destination but a journey. Franz
Rosenzweig described Christianity as a perpetual
journey, that is, an infinite midpoint between the
promise of redemption at the crucifixion, and its
fulfillment at the end of days. By the same token,
Americans remain in perpetual transition between the Old
World culture they abandoned on arrival, and the promise
of redemption that always lies past the sunset.
The most compelling image of American narrative
art is the journey toward redemption: Huck and Jim
rafting down the Mississippi, or John Wayne and Claire
Trevor in the John Ford's 1939 Stagecoach.
Because it presumes a return to innocence, the journey
is set most powerfully in a fairy-tale setting, such as
Ford's Painted Desert location.
But the
Continental Op already has made the journey and has no
hope of redemption. In an uncanny dream sequence, "I
walked ... half the streets in the United States, Gay
Street and Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore, Colfax
Avenue in Baltimore, Aetna Road and St Clair Avenue in
Cleveland, McKinney Avenue in Dallas, Lemartine and
Cornell and Amory Streets in Boston, Berry Boulevard in
Louisville, Lexington Avenue in New York, until I came
to Victoria Street in Jacksonville ... Tired and
discouraged, I went into the lobby of the hotel that
faces the railroad station in Rocky Mount, North
Carolina."
America produces irredeemable
outsiders like Hammett himself: a philandering alcoholic
who burned himself out after half a dozen books and a
handful of screenplays. Americans enjoy the comic
outsider, invariably portrayed as an immigrant or
regional character (Why Americans can't
laugh at American culture, Dec 16, 2003).
They cheer on the loner who rides into town and rights
all the wrongs, an Amadis of Gaul with six guns. But a
clever misfit who already has walked down every street
and expects no redemption frightens Americans. The Op
better resembles the typical American movie villain, the
crafty manipulator and spinner of webs, than the typical
movie hero.
That is why we never have seen
American literature's most characteristic creation on
the screen, which abounds with cynical tough guys, but
cannot abide an intelligent one. In any event, he upsets
the French. "The last word in atrocity, cynicism and
horror," said writer Andre Gide of Red Harvest.
Fortunately for the United States, there still
exist a few of the genuine article. In the 1920s,
Hammett's character worked for the Continental Detective
Agency. Today, he might be a contractor for the Central
Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations.
Instability is his natural element. He acts
unpredictably, even quirkily, to keep the other side off
balance and to discover openings. The point is not so
much that he despises authority, but rather that it is
meaningless to give him orders. The more textbook
counterinsurgency fails, the more responsibility will
devolve to him. Frustrated military commanders will
whisper, "Take care of this for me, and don't tell me
how you did it," and let slip this particular dog of
war.
To paraphrase, as Mephisto told Faust, "all
that you call sin, destruction, in short, evil, is my
proper element". Circumstances may compel the military
and diplomatic hierarchy to give free rein to irregulars
on the ground. "Fewer than 100 men of the army's 5th
Special Forces Group", argued Robert D Kaplan in the
January 4 Wall Street Journal, "essentially took down
the Taliban regime on their own ... they succeeded where
the British and the Soviets before them in Afghanistan
had failed, because they had been given no specific
instructions."
That is the right general idea,
although Afghanistan's pre-existing civil war made the
Special Forces more welcome to the Afghanis than they
are Iraq (The devil and L Paul
Bremer, Jan 21). Covert operatives rather
than Special Forces may play the key role, for that
matter. We will see as little of the real protagonists
in this battle as Americans have seen of the Continental
Op in the cinema.
Like the Op said, sometimes
it's better not to have a plan. American intelligence
lacks the linguistic and cultural expertise to
infiltrate the Iraqi resistance (Why America is
losing the intelligence war, Nov. 11, 2003).
There is, of course, another way to go about the matter.
That is to ignore the question, "What is the enemy's
intent?" and instead change his intent by forcing him to
respond to your provocation. In this game there is no
goal except to keep the initiative, without regard for
the consequences. There is nothing wrong with making
plans, of course - the more plans, the better. My Asia
Times Online colleague Marc Ericson offered an ingenious
one on January 24 (Why Saddam Hussein's
arrest did matter). Assembling a
paramilitary force of "de-Nazified" Ba'athists as a
Sunni counterweight to Shi'ite power in Iraq is a fine
idea. I fear it may be a trifle premature. Heinrich
Heine's verse comes to mind about the death-like
countenance of a rejected suitor:
Die Maedchen
fluestern sich ins Ohr:
"Der Stieg wohl aus dem Grab
empor." Nein, nein, ihr lieben Jungfrauelein:
Der
legt sich erst ins Grab hinein.
The pretty girls
passed by and quipped:
"He must have risen from the
crypt!"
Not yet, I'd tell the girls, if queried:
First he will die, and then be buried.
Resurrecting elements of the Nazi party as
American instruments was facilitated in 1945 by the fact
that most of the Nazis who wished to fight to the death
already had had the opportunity to do so, while German
cities lay in ruins. Before they enter American service
to save themselves from the Shi'ites, the Ba'athist
remnants might require a similar opportunity.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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