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April
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April 14,
2003
A Cheery, Glossy
Take on Horror
The
War's Trashiest Piece of Propaganda
by
JOHN CHUCKMAN
There are scores of candidates for the distinction
of trashiest war propaganda in a mainstream publication, and
readers outside Canada may not recognize my nominee's name, but
I am confident readers will recognize the merit of Margaret Wente's
column in the Toronto Globe and Mail, April 10. I've excluded
CNN and Thomas Friedman from consideration since trash propaganda
on the Middle East is virtually all they do.
Ms. Wente, who normally writes earnestly
on such matters as the angst of parents whose child has stubbed
a toe on faulty play ground equipment in the city of Toronto,
occasionally lends her deep understanding of human nature to
Middle Eastern affairs. Some regard these forays as akin to having
the late Irma Bombeck write on world affairs, but they are wrong,
because Ms. Wente is not funny, not even slightly amusing, just
earnest and overflowing with peculiarly-selective concerns.
Her prize column came with a large photograph
of a happy-faced Iraqi boy walking with a small group of heavily-armed
American soldiers, one of them near the boy smiling generously.
The striking impression was of a photograph taken in Italy near
the end of World War Two, although the glossy technical quality
better resembled modern advertising than war footage. Many ragged
children at that time were photographed smiling at American "GIs"
or "Joes." Some of them had just received a stick of
gum or a bit of chocolate, some were orphans identifying with
the new god-like men in town, and all of them were undoubtedly
glad to see an end to the dreadful sights and sounds of killing.
At first, I thought the editor should, instead, have featured
one of hundreds of searing photographs from the Internet documenting
children who will never smile or walk again, children whose faces
resemble clotted candle wax or with limbs like smashed twigs,
the work of American bombing. But as I read Ms. Wente's cheery,
glossy take on horror, I knew the editor had indeed used the
perfect picture.
Ms. Wente brushed aside concerns the
beaming photo might raise by assuring us that less people had
been killed in twenty-one days of war than Hussein killed every
year. Statements of this nature do serve a purpose: they immediately
signal a writer's true intent. There is no way Ms. Wente could
know accurately how many Iraqis died when she wrote those words
(she addresses herself only to civilians - the poor conscript
soldiers killed while opposing an invasion of their home apparently
counting for nothing), nor could she know how many will yet die
in an unfinished war that has induced chaos in the cities, and
there is certainly no way she could know how many people Hussein
killed each year.
Ms. Wente celebrates the joys of Hussein's
"prison for children" being liberated. We have no way
of knowing what she is talking about since the obscure institution
seems to have appeared out of nowhere, but we must accept that
some children were imprisoned for refusing to join Ba'ath party
organizations. This of course is not improbable in a dictatorship,
but for all we know the children she refers to were delinquents
and the so-called prison a boot camp, something very popular
with their American liberators.
Ms. Wente doesn't let the image of a
prison for children go unembellished. She adds that children
were "tortured and killed" while the men who "kept
the whips and keys" were lavishly rewarded. Wow, in just
a few words, she has the children rendered as youthful resisters
and freedom-fighters and their keepers as whip-totting Gestapo
agents. Somehow, during a quick stopover in Baghdad, Ms. Wente
learned the complete history of this mysterious institution and
apparently managed to locate and scrutinize its books for expenditures
on payroll and leather accessories. I dislike being pushed into
such cynicism, but one has to ask what child ever born would
accept whipping, torture, and death rather than simply joining
a party's politicized equivalent of boy scouts?
Of course, her effort at Nancy Drew and
the Nazi Dungeon of Evil is intended to minimize the impact of
the hundreds of dead and mutilated Iraqi children many of us
are all too familiar with. The American authorities did their
very best to keep us from seeing these images of what war is
really about, but thanks to the Internet and heroic reporters
for organizations like al-Jazeerah, the truth is branded into
memory.
Well, children's dungeons or not, there
are few thoughtful people who aren't glad that Saddam Hussein
is gone, but that is not the same thing as saying they are glad
with the way it was done: in defiance of the concerns of most
of the world's people; in defiance of a majority of the UN Security
Council; and in contempt for the heroic work of UN weapons inspectors
- all while setting an example in international affairs that
we will certainly live to regret. The satisfaction at his departure
also is not the same thing as the immense, long-term problems
created by the government of a people whose attention span to
problems not filling their television screens with smoke and
fireballs is measured in nanoseconds. Ms. Wente is one of those
who see the United States as the brave and noble loner - Kirk
Douglas in "Lonely Are the Brave," Sylvester Styllone
in "Rambo," or Gary Cooper in "High Noon"
- standing away from the ugly mob's opinion (in this case, consisting
of virtually the entire planet) to do what he has somehow mystically
been given to know, deep-down, is the right thing to do. She
shares this view with the President of the United States, a man
who appears never to have read a serious book.
So, why should we be surprised when Ms.
Wente includes such a B-movie line as "Freedom does not
come cheap, I know that," placed in the mouth of an Iraqi?
Now, I suppose it is possible that an Iraqi, exposed to the antics
of CNN and glib hacks from outfits like the Heritage Foundation,
actually repeated this pathetic bromide, but why would a journalist
quote it?
Ms. Wente sprinkles her description of
the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue with suggestive words
like, "For all the jubilation in the streetsThe people cheered
and dancedOn the fringes of the ecstatic crowd." Photographs
of the statue-toppling, just the day before Ms. Wente's glowing
column, had been broadcast all over the world and clearly signified
Hussein's loss of power. Now, it turns out, from an aerial
or high-rise photograph of the square at the time, published
on several Internet sites, that almost the entire square was
empty. There was a tiny group of people and a far greater density
of military vehicles than people. This panoramic view offers
a remarkably different perspective to the published close-ups
of people around the statue and a remarkably different perspective
to Ms. Wente's jubilation in the streets, cheering and dancing,
and ecstatic crowds. The numbers of people in the square appear
to have been so small as to make the words almost silly.
The pictures broadcast of the statue
being toppled were not technically untrue, they simply lacked
perspective. The old adage from statistics that, with one hand
in ice water and the other in boiling water, you are on average
warm, applies to news coverage. In fact, here it appears the
distortion was far greater than talking about the meaningless
average of two extremes because there appears to have been no
balance in the extremes to which the people of Iraq were exposed.
These were photographs of a few happy moments by a small number
of people in a vast trail of tears.
It is ridiculous to focus on one aspect
of a huge and complex situation and declare yourself satisfied
with the result. This is a good deal like celebrating the fact
that some dollar bills are fluttering around for the taking after
a deadly, massive highway crash involving an armored car.
My judgment of the overall tone in Iraq
is supported by reports of Iraqis telling American troops "Thanks,
but now go home." Many Iraqis, fearfully miserable before
the bombing even began, have been pleading unsuccessfully with
the American troops for help. Other reports tell of many Iraqis
simply miserable, not gleeful, sitting and weeping. After all,
their country has been ravaged by bombs, the hospitals overflow
with piteous cases, thousands have been killed, anarchy in the
cities has meant the looting of museums and hospitals, they swallow
the indignity of defeat and occupation, and they face a terribly
uncertain future with possible civil wars and the break-up of
their country. When you throw in the fact that genuine, stable
democracy is a very remote possibility for a country with no
history of it and a devastated economy, there just isn't a whole
lot to celebrate, even though a genuine tyrant has been overthrown.
Well, after a good lot of her bubbly-earnest
touch, Ms. Wente gets around to quoting an expert on the Middle
East, and who else should that be but Mr. Bernard Lewis, the
man regularly trotted out by everyone who wants to make an informed-sounding
negative point about the region? Anyone who has read Mr. Lewis
or listened to one of his lectures will know that he is just
the kind of expert lawyers look for to support a weak case in
an appalling murder trial.
Ms. Wente uses Mr. Lewis the way a ventriloquist
uses a dummy, to say things without seeming to move her own lips.
One of the gems we are offered from "the great scholar of
Islamic history" (This kind of introduction always effectively
tells the reader, "Go ahead, just try disagreeing with someone
like that!") is that nothing about "Ba'athism"
(an awkward neologism referring to the principles of Hussein's
Ba'ath party) is native to Islam, that Ba'athism is in fact an
imported fascist ideology from Europe.
Well, after first wondering why Mr. Lewis,
just introduced as peerless scholar of the Middle East is used
to comment on fascism from Europe - you have to wonder why you'd
even need to call upon any scholar to support so utterly obvious
and banal a statement.
The fact is that almost nothing about
the politics and organization of the Middle East today is native
to the Middle East, and that applies even more completely to
Israel and its institutions than it does to the Arab states.
It all consists of uniforms, flags, posters, slogans, brand names,
ideas, and institutions imported from Europe or America.
This is what you find anywhere in the
world after a long period of colonialism. It was certainly true
of the early United States after it separated from England, with
the President typically being addressed then as "Excellency,"
carrying a sword as a symbol of office, and the country adopting,
wholesale, concepts and phrases from English law and government
tradition. In fact, Americans, for many decades, used to burn
the Pope in effigy on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes day.
Ms. Wente's other profound insight from
Mr. Lewis is the observation that there are two fears in the
Middle East about Iraq's future: one is that democracy won't
work; and the other is that it will. That sounds terribly clever
for a few seconds, international affairs delivered by the late
Oscar Levant. The truth is that it is just about as helpful as
a quip from Oscar Levant to our genuine understanding. So why
would you quote it? Only if you either do not understand what
you are saying or if you are making a cheap propaganda point.
Mr. Lewis is intensely biased in favor
of Israel, and he is very much in demand these days as a speaker
against the world backlash created by Israel's bloody excesses.
You'd be hard put finding a critical statement from Mr. Lewis
on Israel, its policies, or its institutions, but you will find
a huge amount of unflattering observations about Arab societies.
Ironically, many of the observations he makes have relatively
little to do with Arabic studies per se, and more to do with
areas of scholarship such as economic development or the history
political institutions, but perhaps Mr. Lewis is a much greater
and wide-ranging scholar than I am aware.
Societies that are poor and underdeveloped
are just that, poor and underdeveloped. Their particular cultural
history may arguably have had a role or not in their arriving
at that state, but it is the state of poverty and underdevelopment
that retards democracy and the flowering of human rights in every
culture on the planet. It is not a people's history, otherwise
the Renaissance would never have happened, and there would be
millions of Europeans eating gruel and flagellating themselves
in monasteries.
People adapt to change, often surprisingly
readily, especially when it is clear there is a positive future,
but the magic of economic growth has not come to many portions
of the Middle East yet. I truly wish I could see America bringing
billions of dollars in investment, aid, and technical assistance
rather than cluster bombs, but I don't. And the same for Israel,
which always seems to have billions for armaments but does almost
nothing to raise the level of its impoverished neighbors.
Democracy and concern for human rights,
as I've written before, flow naturally out of healthy economic
growth and a rapidly expanding middle class who do not see their
interests served by a single leader or small aristocratic group.
This is the story of Western civilization since the Renaissance.
No bombs or revolutions are required, just the remarkable power
of economic growth to dissolve away ancient traditions and organizations
and bring new ways of looking at things. The experience has been
universally demonstrated from the death of scholasticism in Europe
to the receding backwaters of the American South.
The other time I recall noting Ms. Wente
had departed from her fluffy subject matter in Toronto, she had
joined the chorus of morally-obtuse columnists at the height
of the suicide bombings in Israel to suggest that Palestinian
parents must be deficient. Now, in her anxiety over a Baghdad
institution for 150 children, she has overlooked Israel's gulag
of more than three million Palestinians, an overwhelmingly youthful
population. I reflect on the hopelessness that causes such children
to kill themselves and others instead of enjoying the sunshine
of youth, but I doubt Ms. Wente, so selective in her earnest
concerns, will examine that any time soon.
John Chuckman
can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org
Yesterday's
Features
Zoltan
Grossman
The Perils of Occupation: the Easier
the Victory, the Harder the Peace
Uri
Avnery
The Night After
Wayne Madsen
The Telltale Signs of Empire
David Krieger
Before You Become Too Flushed with Victory, Think of Ali Ismaeel
Abbas
Jeremy
Brecher
What Can the World Do Now That Tanks Prowl Baghdad?
Robert
Jensen
The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
A Patriot Attack on America
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
Joseph
Heller
Nately's Old Man
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/10
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