War Post

What would you say to people who describe 9/11, its precursors and the years since as part of an inherent clash of civilizations?

Well, for one thing it’s not inherent. Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it. Also, I think it’s wrong to think of it as a clash between civilizations, because Islam is not really a civilization but a religion that exists in civilizations all over the world. That is a mischaracterization. I think that, for the most part, the clashes come from a clash of identity within civilizations that feel threatened.

In Belgium, for example, the number one name for a child born today is Mohammed, which isn’t that surprising because Mohammed is the most popular name in the whole world right now. But if you were someone of Flemish ancestry, you must be saying to yourself, where is this going? What is happening to my country’s history and language, our precious place in the world? And if you’re Mohammed you’re probably thinking, they speak for someone else; I’m not one of them.

And it’s very likely that Mohammed has never been to Morocco, or may not even speak Arabic. But he’s really lost. It’s not surprising that he goes off to this mosque and associates with other angry and alienated young men and that Islam becomes more than a religion; it becomes a complete identity. That is why I call it a clash of identity within civilizations. It’s different wherever you go. It’s different in Europe than in the Middle East. It’s different in Indonesia. There are many different expressions of these feelings of alienation, rather than this clash of civilizations.

Lawrence Wright, in an interview I did for the Daily Star Egypt last summer, offering a new explanation — not Samuel Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations," nor Edward Said’s "Clash of Ignorance." A compelling and unique response.

Read the rest of the interview here and another piece I did after talking with Lawrence Wright on the Huffington Post.

The NYT Book Review asked a few writers for war books "they find particularly illuminating." Here’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and author of “A New World Order,” on Michael Herr’s Dispatches:

"With intensity so strong I can almost smell and feel the jungles of Vietnam, Herr chronicles the brutality and boredom of war without intermediation, redeeming glory, medals or even a belief in a cause."

Maybe it’s a bit of wishful thinking, but the omission of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and, most recently, Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad dims the list. That, and no mention of The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

A good idea for the Book Review, but one that seems too much like the editor at the last minute, flipping through the Times’ Rolodex for a feature.

Why The Quiet American? Here:

Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected ricefields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, ‘I hate war.’ There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey—we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.

There you have Bush (as candidate for president) telling Prince Bandar: "I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy." (p. 3). There was a reference about Bandar establishing friendships around the world including with leaders in Israel (p. 4). Bush telling Rice "I don’t have any idea about foreign affairs." (p. 6); that same man is now running the world, and wanting to restructure the Middle East.

 If only the American people, especially those who voted for him, would see the tragic ironies in those admissions. How little American voters ask of their leaders, especially–ironically–when they run for the presidency. There was a scene in which Bandar was informing Bush about the impressions of "the Arab minds." (p. 46). And this advocate of "democracy" and "liberty"–Bush that is–telling Prince Bandar that "Let me make one thing clear up front: nothing should ever break the relationship between us."(p. 76). No matter how many violations of human rights are perpetrated by House of Saud.

On p. 80 there was a reference to a casual conversation between Bush and Bandar in which the former initiates casually the notorious rendition policy: "If we get somebody and we can’t get them to cooperate, we’ll hand them over to you." And then you read about the special secret group that Wolfowitz at the Pentagon formed to advise the US government "well into the Afghanistan bombing campaign." The elite group included such luminaries as Bernard Lewis (he probably regaled them with his numerological predications), Fareed Zakaria, Fouad Ajami, James Q. Wilson, Reuel Marc Gerecht, etc. You get the idea. If those were advising the government on the Middle East and Islam, you know what to expect. They produced a secret document, says Woodward, which had the "insights" that you read in Friedman’s columns (I wonder why he was not included), the bunk about the civil war within Islam. They basically urged the government to go to war against Iraq, concluding that such a war is "inevitable." (p. 84). In the Iraq war (as it was being planned, Bush saw a "public relations opportunity" (p. 107) in the Arab world. You learn that Gen. Abizaid was picked for his command position because he knew "the Arab mind so well." (p. 116).

And then the US government got busy: a search was under way. Rumsfeld issued orders: "[f]ind Iraq’s Hamid Karzai." (p. 131). Bandar then advised Bush and Rice to retain Saddam’s intelligence service: "Look, their intel service was the most efficient."(p. 163) On p. 167, you learn that when US officials (in preparation for the war) talked about Iraqis, they meant Iraqi exiles; and when they talked about Iraqi exiles, they meant Ahmad Chalabi. On p. 187, you learn that the White House lied when it claimed that it had nothing to do with the Mission Accomplished sign; in fact, it was in the original speech by Bush, but Rumsfeld removed it on time. Bremer, upon assuming his responsibilities in Baghdad bragged: "I am the Iraqi government for now."(p. 199). If this is not "liberation" what is?

The US officials thought that Shaykh Qazwini is "a leading cleric" (p. 222). They never heard of Sistani until the war. And Cheney was so involved in the search for WMDs that he would send location tips: he "seemed to have a conviction that something had gone to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley".(p. 238) In a meeting with Bush, he asked: "Do we have the communications strategy to be able to run with AlJazeera"? Bush asked. We have a network. We’re using it," someone said. "We should–Do we have the communications network?" Bush asked. "Yes," someone said again. "We have our network, and we’re also trying to use AlJazeera and Al Arabiya to the extent we can."

 Via the Angry Arab News Service.

A reader recently commented on Lynn Chu’s poem, and it’s appropriateness here. As I explained, I intially read "Why I Continue to Believe" too forgivinginly, maybe, or at least with an idea that the author was trying to be Harold Pinter. I think I was wrong, but now there’s a more interesting question: how does one person’s reaction to war rhetoric differ from another’s, and what do those discrepancies suggest? So far, I can find three reactions to this poem: outrage, as in the comment; satisfaction, as on the milblog that linked to the poem from here and called it a "good read"; and my own reaction. I wasn’t reading Chu and getting outraged or satisfied, instead thinking that this kind of language, in the form of a poem, could only be deliberatly and supremely scathing — it was war critique through war rhetoric. Even if I was wrong and Chu means to be staight-and-narrow Administration, the poem shows it can move and be read as a pro-war rally or as a sarcastic exposé on the rally.

I recently picked up The Places in Between, Rory Stewart’s account of walking across Afghanistan during the start of the American war there. His new book is The Prince of the Marshes, an account of his year in Iraq. It seems as long as you are fluent in Farsi and have diplomatic experience on your resume, you can just show up in Baghdad and be made a deputy governor by the British Foreign Office. Stewart helped administer Maysan province in southern Iraq.

Slate is running excerpts of his new book. Stewart’s mind for history is matched by a drive to go, to see, and to talk to the everyday people whose identities are hidden by history books.

Friday, Oct. 10, 2003
Commentators abroad complained that the Coalition did not remember history. They believed we had ignored important lessons from post-war Germany and Japan and 1920s Iraq. But history has few unambiguous lessons. Many of my colleagues were well respected Arabists with extensive experience in post-war reconstruction, but none of them could guess the exact effect of a foreign invasion, the toppling of the President, and a society turned on its head. No library could tell you about the Prince of the Marshes; there were no polls that would reveal his popularity, now that events tested his strength. I continued to study Iraqi history; I visited neighboring governorate coordinators in four Shia provinces. But what mattered most were local details, daily encounters with men of which we knew little and of whom Iraqis knew little more.

The afternoon of my meeting with the Prince for example, I watched an elderly visitor enter the compound. He did not offer a bribe or an official letter at the gate, so he must have been known by the guard. The Iraqi police searched him and then a British sentry searched him. In exchange for a receipt he handed over his pistol. This indicated that he was not a policeman or a member of the supervisory committee. They were allowed to bring weapons into the building—loaded if they were policemen. Then he was made to sit for ten minutes on a decrepit wicker chair on the sidewalk. Some Iraqi sheikhs who were passing greeted him. It was probably embarrassing to be seen waiting in the sun, but they embraced each other warmly. The man smiled politely when a translator came out to greet him and, after a brief discussion, escorted him up the path to the reception.

Read more 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.)

"Temporary Poem of My Time"
Yehuda Amichai, 1924-2000

Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.
The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert,
The trees bend in the wind,
And stones fly from all four winds,
Into all four winds. They throw stones,
Throw this land, one at the other,
But the land always falls back to the land.
They throw the land, want to get rid of it.
Its stones, its soil, but you can’t get rid of it.

They throw stones, throw stones at me
In 1936, 1938, 1948, 1988,
Semites throw at Semites and anti-Semites at anti-Semites,
Evil men throw and just men throw,
Sinners throw and tempters throw,
Geologists throw and theologists throw,
Archaelogists throw and archhooligans throw,
Kidneys throw stones and gall bladders throw,
Head stones and forehead stones and the heart of a stone,
Stones shaped like a screaming mouth
And stones fitting your eyes
Like a pair of glasses,
The past throws stones at the future,
And all of them fall on the present.
Weeping stones and laughing gravel stones,
Even God in the Bible threw stones,
Even the Urim and Tumim were thrown
And got stuck in the beastplate of justice,
And Herod threw stones and what came out was a Temple.

Oh, the poem of stone sadness
Oh, the poem thrown on the stones
Oh, the poem of thrown stones.
Is there in this land
A stone that was never thrown
And never built and never overturned
And never uncovered and never discovered
And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders
And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers
And never turned into a cornerstone?

Please do not throw any more stones,
You are moving the land,
The holy, whole, open land,
You are moving it to the sea
And the sea doesn’t want it
The sea says, not in me.

Please throw little stones,
Throw snail fossils, throw gravel,
Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek,
Throw soft stones, throw sweet clods,
Throw limestone, throw clay,
Throw sand of the seashore,
Throw dust of the desert, throw rust,
Throw soil, throw wind,
Throw air, throw nothing
Until your hands are weary
And the war is weary
And even peace will be weary and will be.

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, in A Life of Poetry: 1948 - 1994, New York, HarperCollins, 1994.