Saturday, December 04, 2004
Our heart of darkness
Naomi Klein charges that American forces in Iraq are killing, imprisoning, or intimidating doctors, journalists, and clerics to prevent word of civilian casualties from getting out. Her story fits with the facts as we know them (accounts of "anyone who moved" being killed in Falluja, including doctors, the targeting of hospitals and clinics for bombing and take-over, the refusal of the US to do bodycounts, and the estimated 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq).
Most of these stories get little mention in the American press. Klein is writing in the Guardian, and the US acting ambassador complained; a US publication would doubtless find its access to the White House curtailed for such a disloyal publication. But the institutional constraints on media coverage of the civilian costs and immoral conduct of the war are just half the story. The US media has been reluctant to explore or consider the conflict from the point of view of ordinary Iraqis. To be sure, its increasingly hard to do, given how dangerous it is to conduct journalism in Iraq. And Abu Ghraib was a brief exception (but they had pictures, the sine qua non of media in the television age. But the American media seems reluctant, even incapable of framing stories from a Iraq point of view---not just the view of a particular Iraqi on the street, but the view from Iraqi society. Instead, the frame is that the US knows what's best for Iraq, and anyone who disagrees is an insurgent terrorist evil-doer.
But we are doing horrible things to Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy. They will not forget, nor will the rest of the world. I suspect we will be paying for these crimes for a long time. Not least by turning Iraq into the kind of terrorist haven we incorrectly charged it with being.
But then, the Bush administration doesn't really need to stop terror attacks on the US. They want to exploit the symbolism of the terrorist threat, and perversely, that's easier to do it that threat isn't squelched. So they replace cardboard cut out and fingerpainter Tom Ridge with Bernard Kerik, a tough-looking, tough-talking symbol of 9/11 who happens to have awful managerial skills. The job? Only coordinating dozens of uncoordinated, uncooperative agencies, something both he and the Department of Homeland Security are ill-prepared to do. (Pre-Enron, the Bush administration supposed to bring private sector manegerial competence to Washington. They don't talk about that so much anymore.)
After the 9/11 commission identified the importance of inter-agency coordination in preventing further attacks, you'd think we'd get better people to run our agencies. But instead we get loyalists (Rice, Gonzalez), f***-ups (Rumsfield), and symbols (Kerik).
Both at home and in Iraq, the US government is not being held accountable for failure and misconduct. And the electorate just flunked its once-every-four-years chance to impose accountability, so the Bushies have decided to throw what little caution they had to the wind. We will all be paying for this party of fools for a long, long time. But right now, most Americans (or rather, most Red Staters) don't even want to look at the looming crisis.
Most of these stories get little mention in the American press. Klein is writing in the Guardian, and the US acting ambassador complained; a US publication would doubtless find its access to the White House curtailed for such a disloyal publication. But the institutional constraints on media coverage of the civilian costs and immoral conduct of the war are just half the story. The US media has been reluctant to explore or consider the conflict from the point of view of ordinary Iraqis. To be sure, its increasingly hard to do, given how dangerous it is to conduct journalism in Iraq. And Abu Ghraib was a brief exception (but they had pictures, the sine qua non of media in the television age. But the American media seems reluctant, even incapable of framing stories from a Iraq point of view---not just the view of a particular Iraqi on the street, but the view from Iraqi society. Instead, the frame is that the US knows what's best for Iraq, and anyone who disagrees is an insurgent terrorist evil-doer.
But we are doing horrible things to Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy. They will not forget, nor will the rest of the world. I suspect we will be paying for these crimes for a long time. Not least by turning Iraq into the kind of terrorist haven we incorrectly charged it with being.
But then, the Bush administration doesn't really need to stop terror attacks on the US. They want to exploit the symbolism of the terrorist threat, and perversely, that's easier to do it that threat isn't squelched. So they replace cardboard cut out and fingerpainter Tom Ridge with Bernard Kerik, a tough-looking, tough-talking symbol of 9/11 who happens to have awful managerial skills. The job? Only coordinating dozens of uncoordinated, uncooperative agencies, something both he and the Department of Homeland Security are ill-prepared to do. (Pre-Enron, the Bush administration supposed to bring private sector manegerial competence to Washington. They don't talk about that so much anymore.)
After the 9/11 commission identified the importance of inter-agency coordination in preventing further attacks, you'd think we'd get better people to run our agencies. But instead we get loyalists (Rice, Gonzalez), f***-ups (Rumsfield), and symbols (Kerik).
Both at home and in Iraq, the US government is not being held accountable for failure and misconduct. And the electorate just flunked its once-every-four-years chance to impose accountability, so the Bushies have decided to throw what little caution they had to the wind. We will all be paying for this party of fools for a long, long time. But right now, most Americans (or rather, most Red Staters) don't even want to look at the looming crisis.
