Taibbi's article, published by Rolling Stone -
Fort Apache, Iraq
<http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10687189/fort_apache_iraq/>
- details his four week trip with the American 158th Field Artillery unit.
Journalist Nir Rosen, a new America Foundation fellow who, we're told, can “pass for Middle Eastern”, has lived for the past three years in Iraq. His article, published by Truthdig -
The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds
<http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060627_occupation_iraq_hearts_minds/>
- is focused on the devastating impact on Iraqi lives of American occupation.
...
I think we can glean the dominant trend of mainstream American thought about Iraq – on the non-gung ho end of the liberal scale – from Taibbi's piece. Taibbi, as far as I know, can't speak Arabic and, as an obvious Westerner, had understandable safety concerns while in-country so his association with US troops was both practical and inevitable.
Still, at the end of his four frightening weeks with rough riders, he comes away with the banal (and also, by now, often repeated) insight that American troops are people too – just caught up in a whirlwind that pulls in the wicked right alongside the virtuous – destroying both.
Iraqi fighters are fanatics, pure and simple, apparently only motivated by “...the same old totalitarian double-think from the last century that sent Nazis and Communists on crazed quests for paradise by sanctioning the violence buried in their dumb hearts.” Which is an odd assertion, since it leaves out what is probably one of the most basic causes of the guerrilla war: revenge on Americans for direct harm done and the chaos of the occupation itself.
But being only with Americans, thinking only about Americans, writing only about how strange and marvelous and terrible Americans are, especially when they're trying to help, these US suburban fish out of water, dramatically narrows your vision.
You end up settling for over-reaching conclusions like the following, which Taibbi uses as part of his closing statement:
“This is the place where two existential dead ends have come around in a circle to meet in an irreconcilable explosion of violence -- the bureaucratic ennui and intellectual confusion of modern civilized man vs. the recalcitrant, prehistoric fanaticism of Al-Qaeda's literally cave-dwelling despotic mob. Human history has traveled in two exactly opposite directions for the last thousand years, and the supreme irony is that both paths led straight here, to this insane stalemate in the Mesopotamian desert.”
[...]
Four weeks of white knuckle travel through “Fort Apache” (a label, rich with American meanings) Iraq teaches Matt that this conflict is the result of the bored “civilized” meeting the “prehistoric” primitives and fighting it out to the death...for no apparent reason.
...
Nir Rosen also spent time with American troops and recognizes their humanity but critically, he used his unique situation as a person who can “pass for Middle Eastern” and who speaks Arabic to record what these confused, frightened boys and girls from Taibbi's tree-lined suburbs and small towns are doing – each and every day – to Iraqis.
Rosen writes:
Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as “sea changes” that would “break the back” of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention.
A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.
In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.
<snip>
I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.
[...]
This strikes me as a more mature view, one that doesn't depend upon an inflated (and typical) idea of Americans as do-gooders caught-up in a maelstrom of Western ennui and Middle Eastern savagery.
Reading Taibbi's peice made me wonder whether it was possible for Americans to learn anything, really, from the Iraq disaster. Taibbi travelled thousands of miles right into a war zone, only to lovingly look, once again, into a mirror.
.d.
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