> For Rummy and for the media, the identification is more like that in "A
> Little Glass of Rum": Their rage is read as "like us": materialistic to the
> core. They want things. Having been denied them for so long, supposedly,
> their rage is about wanting to possess. Anything, anything at all, simply
> for the sake of possessing it.
Absolutely. I think that this identification is the moment in which the agency of Iraqis gets erased and substituted with a refraction of our own. It's fascinating stuff: here the Iraqis are behaving as we are all supposed to want to behave, they are having their three minutes of libidinal freedom, and just as we have controlled it, so will they have to either control it themselves...or...
But how knows what is being said with the language of violence? Every government office has been destroyed, the actual stuff of political control has been vandalised. The media initially seized on the French and German embassies being looted as an example that selectivity of the rioters embodied (our) fury at these governments, but soon enough the English department at an University in Basra was dilapidated. All these hospitals started burning and god forbid, the oil wells have to be under guard. It's hard to divine _our_ materialism from all this. Sure, people are robbing tonnes of carpets and chandeliers, behaving as one would expect the failed nouvelle riche to do should they suddenly be decompressed, but the signals are all too many to sustain such a gloss. What is far less controversial is the intentionality built into the selectivity in the reporting of these events. Or the selectivity of the US Army, which protected the oil fields while hospitals were destroyed. (Though I would hesitate even to reprimand them, lest they get funny ideas.)
I agree with you that it would be highly unrealistic to think that the US hasn't got some plans for imposing a nasty law and order regime in Iraq. They do this at home, so why expect any better overseas? This current Bacchanal, is in a sense tragic, since its fate has been foretold: it must end with a return to a police state of sorts. The brighter it burns, the more intense will the justification for this regression be.
Thiago