War Post

Hans Haacke, Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W. 21 St. Nov. 5-Dec. 23, 2005.

 

Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is a professor at Berkeley and Bard. He spoke in Cairo last week as a visiting professor at AUC, days before returning to Iraq to cover the civil war. Hear his lecture here.

Danner’s essay in the current New York Review of Books frames the course in Iraq in the 2002 warning of a then-98 year-old George F. Kennan: "Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

To what end will the exposure of the incompetence and criminality of bureaucratic decisions of the last 4 years lead? The American perception to the war was blinded; it’s more recently that the lethal blunders of the White House and Pentagon are being laid bare, in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and in reviews/essays like Danner’s and the Economist’s Max Rodenbeck, also in NY Books. Condoleeza Rice didn’t know the chain of command in Iraq and Paul Bremer was stubborn in following orders to De-Baathify Iraq and immediately disband the army — even if the State Dept. knew nothing about the orders and found out about them after the fact, in the newspapers. As Danner writes,

Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider.

The real shocks of the conflict — beyond that the decision makers in the Pentagon and White House were foreign policy amateurs to horrific degrees — are the human costs in Iraq and the dominance of what Danner calls a "War of Imagination" in America since 9/11. Leaders imagined transformation through a dilettante strategy for a new Iraq and a new Middle East; the region would mold itself to evangelical idealism and neocon pet projects, like Ahmad Chalabi, no matter how far apart that view was from all reality in Iraq and beyond. The American public, responding to buzz words and reminders of terror broadcast out of Washington to a cowed, obsessed media, widely believed the image. The bodies of American soldiers and arguments over how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died jolted the dream.

…for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run"—began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.

While Danner, like many others, sees in the midterm elections a public coming-to-grips with reality and a call to dramatically alter the American course in Iraq, I’m still skeptical. This is from the detachment of living in Cairo, but whether it’s the continued controversy of the term "civil war" in American war talk or the insistence, even today, on the benefit of free elections in a country that thousands flee daily, can you say the American public is really outraged?

Will they ever be, or is this Bush’s ultimate Mission Accomplished?

Art work: George Grosz. (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany.). Die Gesundbeter (German Doctors Fighting the Blockade) from Got mit uns (God for us). (1918, published 1920). Via MoMA.

 

Still Life With Commentator 

A collaboration of composer-pianist Vijay Iyer, poet/librettist/performer Mike Ladd, and conceptual artist/theater director Ibrahim Quraishi, Still Life with Commentator is a lyrical, darkly comic transmedia performance/opera examining the role of the audience and the media in modern warfare. Also featuring experimental vocal artist Pamela Z, electronic percussionist/vocalist Guillermo E. Brown, cellist Okkyung Lee, guitarist Liberty Ellman, and actors Palina Jonsdottir and Masa Nakanishi. 

Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 57, 2005. Image © Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

Via Slate, where Mia Fineman writes, "Botero, by tackling this imagery in a focused and extended series, has demonstrated not only that such things can be represented in art but also that a figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity."

"I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me." England, London I think.

Via the "art terrorist" Banksy.

Marine Eye’s View of Iraq War Photographed in Occupation. 8/27-9/16, 2006

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY — U.S. Marine Corps reservist and Vassar alumnus Major Benjamin Busch has attentively photographed his two tours of duty in the Iraq War, which have spanned the 2003 invasion, an early civil organization project, and a more recent reconstruction deployment. Twenty-one of his 2005 photographs, "Occupation," documenting the effects of the war on both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, will be exhibited Sunday, August 27, through Saturday, September 16, in the James W. Palmer Gallery of the College Center. Busch will discuss his exhibit on Thursday, September 14, at 6:00 p.m. in Taylor Hall, Room 203, followed by a reception at 7:30 p.m. in the Palmer Gallery, and both events are free and open to the public.

"Occupation" spans photographs taken from February through September 2005 in and around Ar Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Al Anwar province. "I tried to record Iraq as its past was dissolving and its future was uncertain. Photographs allow me to hold on to what I notice as I pass through time and place," wrote Busch, a 1992 Vassar studio art graduate, in the exhibit catalogue. "I am often drawn to record fragile evidence and temporary debris for this reason. The walls will be repainted, the cloth will fade, the garbage will tear away from the wire, the people will age, and American troops will eventually withdraw, but these photographs will remain."More.

 

Photos from here.

 

In the magazine Stop Smiling (Issue 25) there is an interview with John Crawford, another National Guardsmen plucked for Iraq who wrote extensively while stationed in Baghdad from late 2002-2003. Crawford was two credits away from graduating from Florida State when he was called up, and while in Baghdad an embedded journalist who read bits of Crawford’s writing put the soldier in touch with a literary agent. Crawford’s book is The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq, and while I wait on interlibrary-loan, here’s a bit from the Stop Smiling interview. Crawford expresses the mentality of hate and frustration felt as a foreign soldier in Iraq when he answers a question about the portrayal of Iraqis in his book.

I majored in anthropology so I thought I was kind of going to be immune from the feelings that you’re 8,000 miles away and you’re just mad. You don’t want to be there and you’re pissed, and, unfortunately, it just manifests itself more often in anger at the people you’re supposed to be helping, the people that are right in front of you.

I knew that it was wrong to be so angry, but I really wanted to show the feelings that you have there. Obviously all Iraqis aren’t terrible people. I ust wanted to show the insanity that you start to feel. When soldiers go over there, some literally didn’t get feelings of anger and could still get along with the locals, but those were the minority. You have to blame someone for being over there, and you blame the locals, whether it’s right or wrong.

There were moments of levity. You get really bad gallows humor - I’ve heard that when they do the crime scene detective films they show in court they have to take the sound out because the cops are making uncomfortable jokes. It’s the same sort of thing - you’re in this uncomfortable situation and you end up making jokes. Like when my friend Creed said to me about the guy who had his head taken off by the .50-cal: "What do you think the last thing that went through his head was?" and we couldn’t stop laughing about that.

It kind of shows the human side - American tend to think their soldiers are somehow perfect, and I think that does them a disservice, because when you have someone who’s perfect and something bad happens, all of the sudden you have to blame them. You’re not giving credit to the emotional spectrum that’s taking them on this ride every day. I think that’s the huge point of my book. All those jokes were just to show that we were human beings in this extraordinary situation, and that’s how we reacted. Of course everybody laughs. People laugh at ridiculous times.  

Listen to Crawford on NPR.

(The painting above is George Grosz, "The Convict": Monteur John Heartfield after Franz Jung’s Attempt to Get Him Up on His Feet, 1920.)

Today on his blog Prof. As’ad AbuKhalil posted a letter from an American soldier stationed in Kuwait. Abu Khalil teaches political science at California State University and guest lectures at Berkeley. Ken Silverstein recently did an excellent profile of the Angry Arab on his Harper’s blog, Washington Babylon.

"Mr. Abu Khalil,
I am myself in a difficult situation. I am in the American military, as you might see from my email address, and am serving in Kuwait. I graduated from Syracuse University where I studied International Relations. My concentration was Middle Eastern studies and conflict resolution (go figure, right?) and I now find myself settled in the middle of a bunch of racists. The images most Americans here on camp have of Kuwaitis aren’t even of Kuwaitis, or even Arabs.
I am emailing I suppose to tell you about how disappointed I have been with the Soldiers and Officers who serve with me. I have tried my best to get them understand the conflicts raging within the area along the Mediterranean, but most wave their hand and dismiss it as a war waging for thousands of years, which you and I both know is not true. I make the effort to explain why we need to deal with conflicts with an even hand, not a biased opinion without facts. I try to give them a glimpse of what it would be like to have an America like Israel. America is not perfect, by no means, but we still have our limits… In America, you don’t get certain rights because you are part of the majority, the white protestant group, or lose them if you decide you would like to follow a different faith. I believe is it completely un-American to support a state such as Israel, yet we are their biggest supporter. What are they, the 18^th richest country in the world? Receiving the most of our tax dollars?
I want to explain to the Soldiers that this conflict is a direct result of the seeds sown by WWI and not of an ancient conflict between Muslims and Jews. The seeds planted by the west are now deeply rooted in the area. Israel exists, and the Zionists continue to exploit those around them, as seen by some of the pictures posted on your “Angry Arab” website. I wanted you to know I am disgusted, and have been since the Iraq War started. There is no one man enough to do the right thing… There is an agenda out there that is so very strong, as you have mentioned. Israel’s plight is shown, but not the innocent bystander Lebanese. It breaks my heart to watch the news because I know what is really happening. It’s no wonder that Americans think the way they do, but somebody must know what is really going on… Or so I keep telling myself.
I believe I will be leaving the military as soon as my commitment is up. What do you think, if you have the time to give me your opinion, is a good course of action once I get out of this military of ours? I want to make a difference in the lives of people and get them to somehow understand what is really happening and also how embarrassed we should be. I wish there were somehow a way to show these people in a light that would make people realize what a crime we are supporting. And even if we’re not supporting, we’re standing by watching and doing nothing, which is most of the time even worse.
Thanks for telling it how it is, and I just wanted you to know, all of us aren’t totally blind."

Barbara Kruger, Untitled No, 1985.