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Billboarding the Iraq disaster
By Anthony Arnove

won't see, as in the case of Darfur, celebrities on the American Broadcasting Co's weekday television program Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.

Why is it that we are counting and thinking about the Sudanese dead as part of a high-profile, celebrity-driven campaign to "Save Darfur", yet Iraqi deaths still in effect go uncounted, and rarely



seem to provoke moral outrage, let alone public campaigns to end the killing? And why are the numbers of killed in Darfur cited without any question, while the numbers of Iraqi dead, unless pitifully low-ball figures, are instantly challenged - or dismissed?

In our world, it seems, there are the worthy victims and the unworthy ones. To get at the difference, consider the posture of the United States toward Sudan and Iraq. According to the Bush administration, Sudan is a "rogue state"; it is on the State Department's list of "state sponsors of terrorism". It stands accused of attacking the US through its role in the suicide-boat bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in 2000.

And then, of course - as Mahmood Mamdani pointed out in the London Review of Books recently - Darfur fits neatly into a narrative of "Muslim-on-Muslim violence", of a "genocide perpetrated by Arabs", a line of argument that appeals heavily to those who would like to change the subject from what the US has done - and is doing - in Iraq. Talking about US accountability for the deaths of the Iraqis the US supposedly liberated is a far less comfortable matter.

It's okay to discuss US "complicity" in human-rights abuses, but only as long as you remain focused on sins of omission, not commission. The US is failing the people of Darfur by not militarily intervening. If only the US had used its military more aggressively. When, however, the US does intervene, and wreak havoc in the process, it's another matter.

If anything, the focus on Darfur serves to legitimize the idea of US intervention, of being more of an empire, not less of one, at the very moment when the carnage that such intervention causes is all too visible and is being widely repudiated around the globe. This has also contributed to a situation in which the violence for which the United States is the most responsible, Iraq, is that for which it is held the least accountable at home.

If anyone erred in Iraq, we now hear establishment critics of the invasion and occupation suggest, the real problem was administration incompetence or President Bush's overly optimistic belief that he could bring democracy to Arab or Muslim people, who, we are told, "have no tradition of democracy", who are from a "sick" and "broken society" - and, in brutalizing one another in a civil war, are now showing their true nature.

There is a general agreement across much of the political spectrum that we can blame Iraqis for the problems they face. In a much-lauded speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, US Senator Barack Obama couched his criticism of Bush administration policy in a call for "no more coddling" of the Iraqi government: The United States, he insisted, "is not going to hold together this country indefinitely".

Richard Perle, one of the neo-conservative architects of the invasion of Iraq, now says he "underestimated the depravity" of the Iraqis. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democratic challenger in the 2008 presidential election, recently asked, "How much are we willing to sacrifice" for the Iraqis? As if the Iraqis asked the US to invade their country and make their world a living hell and are now letting Americans down.

This is what happens when the imperial burden gets too heavy. The natives come in for a lashing.

The disaster the United States has wrought in Iraq is worsening by the day, and its effects will be long-lasting. How long they last, and how far they spread beyond Iraq, will depend on how quickly the US government can be forced to end its occupation.

It will also depend on how all of us Americans react the next time we hear that we must attack another country to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction, "spread democracy", or undertake a "humanitarian intervention". In the meantime, it's worth thinking about what all those horrific figures will look like next March, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion, and the March after, on the sixth, and the March after that ...

Put it on a billboard - in your head, if nowhere else.

Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (American Empire Project, Metropolitan) and, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of the People's History of the United States (Seven Stories).

(Copyright 2007 Anthony Arnove.)

(Used by permission of Tomdispatch)

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