THEATER REVIEW Still embedded in
Iraq By Ashraf Fahim
Deep
within a secret chamber of the Pentagon, the Office of
Special Plans (OSP) convenes. Six members of President
George W Bush's war cabinet, wearing stark masks, hash
out the official rationale for invading "Gomorrah".
"It's weapons of annihilation," says Pearly
White. Woof disagrees. "The mission we decided on was
'killed his own'." "No," says Dick, "It was the day that
changed the world."
One year after the first
shots were fired in anger, Embedded, a satire by
Hollywood actor and anti-war activist Tim Robbins, now
running at the Public Theater in New York, takes a bite
out of the reality of the Iraq war.
In a series
of short, sharp sketches, cut in with blasting rock
music and projections of wars old and new,
Embedded lampoons the Bush administration's
manipulation of a willingly jingoistic media in the
run-up to and aftermath of the war. Through the eyes of
reporters, well-meaning soldiers and the shadowy cabal
in the OSP, we witness the invasion of Gomorrah (Iraq),
the fall of Babylon (Baghdad) and the chaos that
lingers.
With Iraq a key issue in the upcoming
presidential elections in November, Robbins' play could
not be more timely. A Gallup poll in early March
suggested that 52 percent of Americans now believe the
war was worth fighting, and 44 percent say it wasn't.
The real-world versions of Robbins' thinly disguised
neo-con brain trust have plenty of voters to convince of
the justness of their mission, whatever its actual
motivation.
The media war The crucible
for the media war in Robbins' well-observed play is the
Jessica Lynch story. Renamed Jen, the cute-as-a-button
all-American private becomes a useful foil in the early
days of the invasion, when casualties are mounting, and
public support is going south. In crisis mode, the OSP
convenes. Cove (Karl Rove, one assumes) offers his two
cents. "First we need to accuse the Gommorites of war
crimes, violation of the Geneva Convention," he says.
"Two, we need an event, a rescue. Have we found the
pretty little private that was captured?" Jen's brave
resistance and torture by her Iraqi captors is then
concocted, to be regurgitated by a pliant media thirsty
for heroism.
Robbins, who wrote and directed the
play, damns the media for failing in their mission as
the "first line of history", as Colin Stringer, the only
truly independent reporter in the play, calls it. The
journalists embedded with the advancing troops are
whipped into shape by Hardchannel, a barking, Broadway
musical-loving drill sergeant, who is unapologetic about
his contempt for them. By and large, they respect the
strict limitations he lays down on coverage. Only
Stringer tries to slip those bonds. "Ever feel like a
publicist?" he asks a colleague at the end, disgusted
with their failure to get the truth out.
In the
post-war autopsy, Robbins has plenty of evidence to
support his critique of the media's impotence. A study
by the University of Maryland published on March 9, for
example, lambasts the mainstream media's failure to
scrutinize the Bush administration's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) claims, the causus belli, in
particular, the assumption that terrorism and WMD
constituted a unified threat. "The study documented that
in May 1998, only a handful of stories in the US and UK
press made a clear linkage between WMD and terrorism by
either a rogue group or state," wrote the study's author
and journalism professor Susan Moeller. "Most of the
media made careful distinctions between acts of
terrorism and the acquisition or use of WMD. But by
October 2002, a year after September 11, President Bush
and Secretary Rumsfeld's constant linkages of terrorism
and Iraq and WMD had engrained the three as a triple
threat in the media."
In Embedded, the
mainstream media is personified, in part, by Amy
Constant, star reporter for the "old gray lady" (read
New York Times). Her doubts about the existence of
"Weapons of Mass Annihilation" are gently assuaged by
Hardchannel, who dangles exclusives once the gates of
Gomorrah fall. "We know where to find them," he assures
her. Later, she excoriates at him for all the
retractions she's had to issue after printing stories
about weapons that don't exist. "Well, the Gommorites
are really good at hiding things," Hardchannel protests.
"They're very sneaky folks."
At heart, Robbins'
play is about the shepherding of imagery. What Americans
were permitted to see of the war was crucial to creating
acquiescence. As the invasion of Gomorrah commences,
Hardchannel pushes coverage of mass graves, but won't
allow them of civilian casualties. "So it's OK to show
close-ups of decayed, exhumed bodies but not fresh
ones?" asks photojournalist Camera Kid. The sanitized
version of the play's war collapses once and for all
when a reporter finds her way into an Iraqi graveyard
brimming with new arrivals from the US bombing near the
end of the show. The veil is then fully rent with
graphic projections of Iraqi civilian casualties set to
Bob Dylan's 1960s anti-Vietnam war anthem, Masters of
War. As Dylan thunders against the Masters - "I just
want you to know I can see though your masks" - the
stage illuminates and the masked OSP appears, literally
patting themselves on the back for a war fought with
"alacrity".
Embedded is hard-hitting
material from a veteran of the anti-war movement and
various left-wing causes. And Robbins' fury at the Bush
administration speaks to the continued polarization of
the debate in the US. Hitherto, the pro-war camp that
has staked out the patriotic high ground, and critics of
the war like Robbins have suffered for their dissent:
The 15th anniversary celebration of Robbins film Bull
Durham was cancelled by the Baseball Hall of Fame in
April because of Robbins' anti-war views. But in an
election year, and especially with the inability to find
WMD, anti-war voices have grown bolder.
Likewise, the administration's defenders have
gone into overdrive. America's bestseller lists brim
with polemics by Michael Moore against the Bushites and
by neo-cons promoting their agenda (Deliver Us From
Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism,
by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, is now number 1 on the
New York Times Bestseller list). The sharpest scenes in
Embedded are those that take the gloves off and
come at the administration from that hard left, mocking
Bush as boy emperor. "The president wants a crown,"
Gondola (Condoleezza Rice?) tells the OSP. "He says
he'll only wear it in private when he's watching
sports."
The morning after For all its
biting sarcasm, Robbins' play is not without balance.
There is, foremost, a palpable veneration for the
troops. There is also recognition of the complexity of
the situation that alludes to the ambivalent anti-war
position represented by Democratic frontrunner John
Kerry. In his one-year-after anniversary statement on
March 19, Kerry didn't attack the idea of going to war,
only the way it was conducted, the emerging default
position of the anti-war centrists.
The
ambivalence of some Iraqis is also acknowledged by
Robbins. The kindly doctor in the Nassiriya hospital
where Jen is cared for, the production's only Arab
character, suggests that some Iraqis may have welcomed
the invasion, if not the occupation. Jen lies on a
spotlighted bed that is the only set piece on an
otherwise darkened stage. The doctor, in the shadows,
tells his traumatized patient of his torture by Saddam
Hussein's regime. "Some of us are happy you are here,"
he says in a soothing whisper. "Some of us want things
to change."
As Gomorrah falls to US conquest,
Robbins' characters begin to grapple with the messy
aftermath, voicing the acute confusion most Americans
feel about how Iraqis have greeted their "liberators".
Colonel Buford T of Babylon Command struggles to
rationalize Iraqi enmity. "These pockets of resistance
are the expected aftershocks of war," he says. "There
are always gonna be mentally disturbed people who would
rather draw attention to themselves by blowing
themselves up than to wake up and face the smell of the
music."
Robbins then jumps to the frantic
attempts by the OSP to justify the war's ensuing chaos,
offering a clever exposition of their various ex-post
facto justifications. "The more successful we are, the
more they go after our success," offers Woof of rising
insurgent attacks. Such self-contained logic has yet to
convince a plurality of Americans. The imagery now
available from unembedded journalists - guerilla attacks
and car and suicide bombs across "Gomorrah",
anti-American demonstrations, and graphics of numbers of
dead soldiers (even if seeing the coffins is forbidden)
- are far more persuasive.
(The play's limited
run at the Public has been extended to April
11.)
Ashraf Fahim is a freelance writer
on Middle Eastern affairs based in New York and London.
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Mar 27, 2004
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