LOOTING THE LIBERATION
Donald Rumsfeld turned on journalists for running stories about the widespread looting and disorder in 'liberated' Iraq: 'Henny Penny, the sky's falling down!' His point was that no matter how good the news, journalists were predisposed to see the negative side.
Of course there is a problem. The Iraqis were bystanders at their own liberation, and have no ownership of it. Where real liberation takes place, the liberated are authors of their own freedom. In the process, they create alternative sources of power to the old regime. No such process has taken place in Iraq. Rumsfeld's comparison with Eastern Europe in 1989 is better than he knows - there, too, the masses were a stage army, wholly isolated from the actual transfer of power. Better still would be Eastern Europe in 1945-50 where the German empire collapsed leaving Stalin's troops to impose 'socialism', as Rumsfeld's must impose 'democracy'. Already the US army has had to re-install Ba'athist police and civil authorities, as the only element that represents order.
But for all the problems, Rumsfeld has a point. Throughout Europe and the Middle East, as indeed among the intelligentsia in the USA, the desire for the military operation to fail is palpable. Commentators have latched on to the current civil disorder as evidence of the dire consequences of American hubris.
It is pointed that the growing criticism of the US over the conduct of occupation is not in any sense a rejection of imperialism. In fact, the United Nations, along with the 'anti-war' trio France, Germany and Russia, are demanding a more systematic and orderly Western domination of Iraq, under UN auspices, not liberation. UN chief Kofi Annan's criticism of the US is that it is that it is failing to fulfil its obligations as an occupying power to restore order. The image of a lawless Iraq riven by ethnic hatred suits those Europeans who want to chide the US for underestimating the tasks of nation-building. 'The Yanks are too gung-ho', they are saying, 'we appreciate the long haul that ruling the natives really involves'. In all of this hand-wringing, the prospects of Iraq's liberation are more distant than ever.
WARNOGRAPHY
Tony Blair achieved his war aims when a crowd of Iraqi men danced on a fallen statue of Saddam Hussein. Anyone who watched this 'moment of history' live on TV will know that it was edited down from two hours of oddly tedious television coverage. A crowd of fewer than 200 Iraqi civilians were unable to bring the statue down and eventually the American military intervened with a specialised armoured vehicle. At the key moment, the camera's focus narrowed from the tiny crowd in the huge square to make the shot the world had been waiting for.
Trying to fill in time, as the Iraqis at first failed to make much progress and then the marines carefully went about their business, the BBC studio anchors kept asking their man in Baghdad, Rageh Omaar, to 'explain the symbolism' of the scenes we were witnessing. In an effort to oblige them, he was forced to come up with observations so banal that the coverage came to symbolise nothing other than the manufacture of symbols. The only moment that felt entirely unscripted was when a marine put the Stars and Stripes over Saddam's face. You could feel the tension in the studio and the relief when moments later it was taken off again, presumably after a call from a spin-doctor in Qatar.
If watching this 'historical moment' live was tedious, it was also perversely compelling. It simultaneously pandered to a desire to experience the real thing and offered the comfort of knowing that this was not the real thing, with all its attendant demands and difficulties. The more breathless the commentators became about the historical significance of it all, the more conscious the viewer became that this was not so much a conquest or a liberation as it was a photo-opportunity, albeit a photo-op which necessitated the invasion of a country, the destruction of a state and the massacre of thousands.
A LONG INCUBATION
In the first Gulf War the US authorities and Kuwaiti exiles manufactured atrocity stories to galvanise support for action against Iraq. One 'eye-witness' account was that Iraqi troops had thrown Kuwaiti babies onto the floor to steal the incubators. The story was widely reported as the final proof of Iraqi barbarism. Only subsequently was the story revealed to be a myth cooked-up by PR firm Hill & Knowlton. But life imitates art, and 12 years later the story came true, not under an Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, but an American occupation of Iraq. A shocked BBC reporter saw looters leaving a hospital with incubators. Attacking the story, Downing Street argued that the hospital looted was a privilege of the regime and therefore a legitimate target. So that's all right, then.
-- James Heartfield
http://www.heartfield.demon.co.uk/james1.htm