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The bright, shining
lie
By Jonathan Schell
Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing
historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single
news report. Such is the case in regard to the
Iraq war, it seems, with the recent story in the
Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Steve
Fainaru called "Building Iraq's Army: Mission
Improbable". Shadid and Fainaru did something that
is rarely done: they spent several days with a
unit of Iraq's new, American-trained forces. (The
typical treatment of the topic consists of a few
interviews with American officers in the Green
Zone in Baghdad, leading to some estimation of how
long it will take to complete the job.) The Post
story starts with the lyrics of a song the
soldiers of the unit, called Charlie Company, were
singing out of earshot of their American
overseers. It was a ballad to Saddam Hussein, and
it ran:
We have lived in humiliation since
you left
We had hoped to spend our life with
you
The American media often discuss
the political makeup of the insurgency, but no one
until now has suggested that some of the very
forces being trained by the United States might be
longing for the return of Saddam. To the extent
that this is the case - or that these forces are
otherwise opposed to the occupation - the United
States, far from improving "security", is now
training the future resistance to itself.
Indeed, the soldiers of Charlie Company
told Shadid and Fainaru that 17 of them had quit
in recent days. They added that every one of them
planned to do the same as soon as possible. Their
reasons were simple. They were bitter at the
United States. "Look at the homes of the Iraqis,"
one soldier remarked. "The people have been
destroyed." When asked by whom, he answered,
"Them" - and pointed to the Americans leading the
patrol.
The Iraqis had enlisted in the new
army only for the salary - US$340 per month, an
enviable sum in today's ruined Iraq. But the money
had come at the price of self-respect. The new
recruits had been bought off and hated themselves
for it. One said that after they had all quit,
"We'll live by God, but we'll have our respect."
One might wonder whether the reporters had
deliberately or unknowingly picked an
exceptionally rebellious unit. But in fact,
Charlie Company was selected by the US Army
itself, presumably eager to put its best foot
forward.
The American officers' response
to their sullen recruits is of a piece with the
entire American effort in Iraq. The officers treat
their charges as if, owing to certain mysterious
personal defects, they somehow are not quite up to
the job they have been given.
After a
typical episode in which the unit was attacked and
ran away (four hailed taxis to make their escape),
Sergeant Rick McGovern, who leads the unit,
dressed them down. "You are all cowards," he
informed them. He went on, "My soldiers are over
here, away from our families for a year. We are
willing to die for you to have freedom. You should
be willing to die for your own freedom." The
tongue-lashing assumed that the Iraqis and the
American shared a cause that, as the story shows,
was actually 100% missing.
Iraqi men who
hate the American occupation are not cowards if
they decline to shoot other men who are fighting
the occupation. On the contrary, the more courage
they had, the less they would engage in such a
fight. The men of Charlie Company do indeed lack
courage - courage to turn down the money they
accept for pretending to fight for a cause they
despise. Their most cowardly moment, given their
beliefs, was when they sat still while Sergeant
McGovern called them cowards. One soldier, Amar
Mana, explained the situation in the clearest
terms: "We don't want to take responsibility," he
said. "The way the situation is, we wouldn't be
ready to take responsibility for a thousand
years."
And so the Americans and the
Iraqis of Charlie Company, like the United States
and Iraq in general today, are led, by choice on
the one side and by bribery and compulsion on the
other, to play roles in a script that has little
or nothing to do with the situation they are
actually in. In this situation, it is not
necessary to form a whole sentence to tell a lie.
Use of single words or phrases - "Iraqi
sovereignty", "freedom", "election", "security",
"democracy", "anti-Iraqi forces", even "courage"
and "cowardice" - involve the speaker in
deception, for they are the constitutive elements
of a framework of thought and belief that is
itself a fabrication.
The American
occupation of Iraq is something new, but the
fundamental error of the United States has a long
pedigree. It is the imprisonment of the human mind
in ideology backed by violence. The classic
example is Joseph Stalin's Russia, under which
decades of misrule were rationalized as a "stage"
on the way to the radiant future of true
communism. As for the miserable present, it was
amusingly called "actually existing communism".
The future, when it came, of course was not
communism at all but the disintegration of the
whole enterprise. All the "stages" turned out to
lead nowhere.
Once the mind is in the grip
of such a system, every "actually existing" horror
can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful
larger picture, every defeat a stage on the way to
the glorious future. The simpler and more coherent
an ideology, the better it can withstand the
assault of fact. So today in Iraq, every act of
torture, every flattened city, every gushing
sewer, every car-bombing and beheading, is
presented as a bump on the road to "freedom" for
Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the
whole world, in which President George W Bush has
promised an "end to tyranny". (It's apparently a
rule of ideology that the more sordid the reality,
the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal
must be.)
But a moment comes - perhaps it
is a sudden defeat, or perhaps it is merely
reading a story like Shadid and Fainaru's - when
the fantasy dissolves, and then one is left
face-to-face with the factual truth. All the
"exceptions" turn out to be the rule. When that
happens with respect to Iraq, America's grotesque
misadventure there - born of lies, sustained by
lies and productive of more lies every day it
continues - will be brought to a close.
Jonathan Schell, author of
The Unconquerable World, is the Nation
Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The
Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published
by Nation Books.
(Copyright 2005
Jonathan Schell)
(Published with
permission of Tomdispatch.com/The
Nation Magazine) |
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