Last month was the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a day which passed quietly in the U.S. for the most part. For the majority of newspapers, the anniversary was granted a footnote lost between the inner-pages, vying for the reader’s attention amidst a sea of advertisements and extraneous print. And when covered at any appreciable length, the War was generally framed along the lines of the presumptuous question “what went wrong?” posed as if a war in Iraq had ever been "our" right to wage in the first place.
The 10th anniversary of the
invasion did not pass quietly in Iraq, however. On the eve of the anniversary
dozens of people died in a series of car bomb attacks that swept across
Baghdad, bathing the city in terror and plumes of acrid smoke. Contrary to
dog-eared statements about building democracy, fighting terrorism, or saving the
world from weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. had entered an Iraq whose
society had been torn apart by decades of war and misrule, and left it in much the
same state. In any case, no one could honestly claim “mission accomplished.”
In my essay “Into the Abyss” I
attempted to understand the Iraq War from the angle of American torture. The
torture of thousands of Iraqis by Americans was a definitive part of the War,
functioning in many ways as an allegory for the War itself. It was on bad
intelligence secured through torture that the U.S. government first obtained
the material with which it manufactured the war’s pretext. Later, after
official lies proved hollow, American forces were encouraged to torture Iraqis
in a desperate move to crush a nascent insurgency – an insurgency which had for
the most part been created as a direct result of American policy blunders and
which was entirely misunderstood by officials.
Instead of acknowledging their mistakes
the American occupiers clung to the fictions which had brought them into Iraq.
Torture played an important role in validating this process of self-delusion
and national murder. Almost invariably, the answer to whatever question was
sought through torture was presupposed, a tendency which is, in fact,
characteristic of the practice. After all, why would anyone torture somebody
unless they assumed that person was guilty; and why would anyone stop torturing
someone unless they liked the information told to them – that is to say, heard
what they wanted to hear, what they already thought they knew.
Thus the thousands of Iraqis languishing in
prisons, piles of contradictory reports and cumbersome intelligence apparatus
signified not omniscience but great ignorance. The intelligence apparatus was
huge precisely because the U.S. did not at all understand Iraq and,
consequently, was grasping for intelligence any way it could. What existed was
a spectacle of omnipotence, foresight and exceptionality in their absence; a
bloated system of imprisonment and torture whose monstrous size was
proportionate to the ignorance which sustained it. Under the shadow of occupation the fact that the CIA did
not have a single trained corps of interrogators before 9/11 went unnoticed.
Also unnoticed was the reality that under pressure for intelligence the military
pushed soldiers through interrogation training camps, some of which lasted only
a week or two.
And while American torture can be seen
as a microcosm of the Iraq War, it may also be seen as merely the pinnacle of decades-long
American policies in the Middle East, putting these policies into brutal, sharp
relief. In the 1980s the U.S. smiled benignly on Saddam Hussein, bearing him
gifts of logistical support, big guns and chemical weapons as he engaged in an
eight-year bloodletting with Iran. After deliberately fanning the flames of the Iran-Iraq War –
the longest conventional war of the 20th century – the U.S. attitude
towards Iraq suddenly cooled. Next came the Second Gulf War when the U.S.
drove Iraqis forces out of Kuwait, in the process sowing Iraq with depleted
uranium shells. These seeds of death predictably caused cancer rates in Iraq to
swell to ghastly levels.
Then came the U.S.-led sanctions of the
1990s which were imposed because of fears of WMD. These sanctions, which a
former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq called “genocide,” directly resulted
in the preventable deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children. Presumably these
500,000 children were in cahoots with the so-called “terrorists” and madmen
whom the American government claimed to be combating.
In short, even before the U.S. decided
to wage its latest war on the Iraqi people their country was in tatters, a
withered shadow of its former self. Cancer rates were through the roof,
children had no paper for school and the water-borne disease was endemic. Far
from being a bastion of terrorism or WMD, the Iraq was an enfeebled and broken
country, having been subjected to one of the most punitive sanctions regimes in
the history of mankind.
Thus in many ways, torture was the
completion of a slow but practiced process of national murder. With contemporary
history as its backdrop, torture can be seen as a physical and direct enactment
of what had been occurring in Iraq through less apparent means during the past
decades.
Perhaps the most astounding truth of
this experience, however, is the fact that these crimes against humanity were generally
not committed by coldblooded individuals but people who are not all that
different from you or me. To dismiss these atrocities as either the actions of
a few “bad apples” or blame them wholly on top officials is to make the same
error. In both cases the problem is blamed on a cloistered set of individuals who
are deemed absolutely evil. The danger inherent in this line of thinking is
several-fold.
First, it perpetuates the notion of
"absolutely evil” individuals, buttressing the idea that the world can be
cleanly demarcated between wholly just people who are on “crusade” against an
“Axis of Evil.” This is, of course, precisely the same simplistic way of
thinking which led to the American invasion of Iraq in the first place. So when
some critics of the Bush administration paint Bush and his colleagues as wholly
wicked people they ironically employ the same stale logic as the war salesmen
in the White House.
And when images from Abu Ghraib are
viewed from the comfort of a lazy boy sofa it is easy to divorce the crime from
its environment. Deaths of comrades, sleepless nights and the corrupting
influence of the power found in a gun are skillfully left out of the picture. Projecting
blame on a small coterie of “bad apples” allows the beholder to take up the
position of the righteous observer. The fact that atrocity is intrinsic to war
and that the observer on the lazy boy may very well have endorsed the present
war is left untouched. In other words, in heaping all the blame on a few
people overseas the crime is reduced to an abstraction and one’s own guilt as a
supporter of the war remains unacknowledged. For what could be a greater act of
torture than the slow poisoning, starvation and occupation of an entire
society?
In closing, I would like to emphasize that the past is not even the past yet. Obama came to office promising to shut down Guantanamo, yet the illegal
human warehouse is still running. In a spectacular act of courage many prisoners
are engaging in a peaceful hunger strike at the prisons. Their protests have
been met with forced feedings, an excruciating procedure which is also a recognized act of torture. Unfortunately,
power often does not comprehend the language of peaceful protest, it being too
often accustomed to the language of violence. Lastly, the trend towards secrecy
and use of illegal powers has increased considerably under Obama. With a touch
of the button the government can prosecutes drone wars against the people of
Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere.
And a trend towards the over-classification of
documents, in violation of federal law, has continued. The prosecution of Bradley Manning for
delivering documents to WikiLeaks is thus an interesting case, seeing as the
information he gave to WikiLeaks was probably supposed to be in the public
record in the first place. He may very well be jailed for releasing document
which the government illegally classified.
History is generally inconvenient and all-too-quickly forgotten. War criminals of yesterday become the heroes of today, their faces benevolently smiling upon us from the pages of their ghostwritten memoirs. Some even found their own libraries.
But if we are to be more than disengaged, semi-sentient vegetables then we must remember. The very act of remembering is a form of resistance, an adamant refusal to yield to the sedate blandishments and hypnotic drivel spoon-fed to us on a daily basis. Above all, it is an act of solidarity with the victims: an affirmation of their existence, an existence which those in power would rather have us forget.
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