Virginia Tilley
Counterpunch, 14 April 2004
If any shred of moral authority remained to the US occupation of Iraq, it finally evaporated in a single historical phrase, at a press conference in Baghdad this Easter morning. For those who missed it, an Arab journalist had asked commanding Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt what people should understand about the US occupation from the images they were seeing of women and children killed in Fallujah, where over four hundred civilians have been killed and thousands wounded so far in the US attack to repress–who exactly? But the tall general had his answer. Nailing the journalist with flashing eye, he pronounced the measured solution to this moral dilemma: "Change…the…channel! Change…the…channel!"
It is, apparently, just the
baseless propaganda of Arab media like al-Jazeera which has
hallucinated, for a gullible public, hundreds of Iraqi civilian dead
under the US attack. Switch to some "honest" coverage and we will get
the "true" story–apparently, of US soldiers fighting the good fight and
not killing the women and children whose bodies are being carted out of
Fallujah in convoys. As Iraqi doctors in Fallujah scream frantic pleas
for a US ceasefire into CNN ABC, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC camera lenses, it
is not clear precisely what "changing the channel" is supposed to gain
us. But, the General stressed, the US troops didnâ’t kill those
innocents on purpose and, if we get the right commentary, we might
rightly grasp that point and be relieved.
Instead
of sober humility regarding a ferocious policy gone foul, Kimmitt
radiated indignation as he laid out the grossly unfair situation in
which his forces struggle. Militants take cover in a mosque, you see.
Then they fire on US troops from that mosque. When the US forces blow up
the mosqueâ’s wall to get at the militants, they use the mosqueâ’s
loudspeaker to denounce the US occupation for brutality and human rights
violations. How can anyone be so blind as to blame US soldiers for
doing what they have to do, facing such nefarious treatment? The
Generalâ’s own logics, of course, preclude his mental backtracking to
consider that the US should not be confronting militants in a mosque in
the first place. That, if US forces find themselves in such a dilemma,
it is because they have screwed it all up.
The
similarity to the moral rot of Vietnam is so glaring that it hardly
needs mention ("we had to destroy the village in order to save it,"
"children will kill you just as quick as an adult," etc.). But another
ghostly image floated behind the fine general as he made this amazing
pronouncement, one picked up by the film Gandhi because it was, indeed, a
turning point for British colonial rule in India. In 1919, one General
Dyer had brought his troops to repress a demonstration against British
rule in a walled garden square in Amritsar. Ten-thousand Indians–unarmed
women, children, men and activists–had crowded into the space to listen
to speeches and chant slogans for independence. The fine British
general ordered them to disperse; when they hesitated, he drew up his
troops; when they milled in confusion, he ordered his troops to open
fire with machine guns. Some four hundred people died, most of bullets,
others crushed beneath dozens who jumped into the central well trying to
escape. Another 1200 wounded lay bleeding helplessly as Dyer pulled his
troops out and left them there. On a symbolic level, British rule wrote
its epitaph that day.
Yet the ultimate demise
of British authority was capped later: in the elevated chin, steely
gaze, and unassailable moral certainty of the British general (war
criminal) as he explained his actions to a investigating tribunal as
just action against a dangerous unruly mob. His fatuous image formed the
ghostly backdrop behind the aquiline profile of General Kimmitt, as
with equally steely moral certitude, he blamed stubborn and irrational
Iraqi militants for failing to grasp the moral lesson of his guns: if
they would simply and unilaterally stop fighting, his troops would stop
bombarding those women and children and all would be well.
Political
suicide indeed reeked from the press conference as Kimmitt and his
civilian counterpart explained the iron-fist policy which has
flabbergasted the international community for its short-sighted and
self-destructive stupidity. For these architects of occupation, the
horrible dismemberment of four US mercenaries in Fallujah did not call
for what might seem obvious: urgent enlistment of local Iraqi
authorities in Fallujah, who were equally appalled by the event, to help
identify and isolate (politically and socially) the few dozen people
who had been involved. Rather, it called for surrounding the entire city
and ultimately attacking the entire populace, to crush and flush out
the evil-doers–a strategy that scandalized the entire country and lost
the peace even while it flailed about in the battle. For things were
already pretty bad. As Patrick Graham wrote recently in the Guardian
Observer, "In the areas outside Falluja, the American army controls only
what it can shoot."
Similarly, the hard-line
resistance of Muqtada al-Sadr has not manifested to the US military as
it has manifested to the rest of the world: as a difficult but subtle
political matter calling for careful coordination with alternative
Shiâ’a figures–other Shiâ’a clerics, sympathetic Shiâ’a business
networks, Sunni clerical intermediaries–to cultivate factional
rapprochement, foster public debate and steer political direction within
the Shiâ’a community toward defusing and minimizing al-Sadrâ’s appeal.
Such methods were simply not in the worldview of a US military authority
which understands all serious Iraqi protest as an extension of war.
Rather, al-Sadrâ’s appeal was granted vastly more moral authority by
clumsy US closure of his dinky newspaper, arrest of his lieutenant and
now his own arrest warrant. Al-Sadr might even be thanking the US forces
for transforming him from a fringe voice to a charismatic
anti-occupation icon. The US approach is all the more bizarre for its
ludicrous premise: that it can arrest al-Sadr without an all-out assault
on the holy city of Najaf, which is impossible without losing all of
southern Iraq to a general uprising. Having established such terms for
itself, the US occupation is doomed in its failure or in its success. It
has already lost the peace.
The whole fiasco
signals one other factor, one which stood invisibly behind the US
generals throughout the Fallujah attack but is not a ghost: the
Israelis. Few people familiar with the regionâ’s history watched
Fallujah without thinking of Jenin. One could almost hear the Israeli
voices around the paper-strewn tables of US command centers: "O US
brethren, at last you have fully grasped the dangers of Arab terror, and
at last you will listen to us. We have long experience and great
expertise in military occupation. We know how to be tough with the
Arabs. Here is what you must do." And so the US military has picked up
Sharonâ’s big stick, and US citizens are all staring at the oncoming
consequences: we are preparing to live like Israelis. But, hey, all we
really need to do is change the channel.
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