Pictures Of A Flawed War
This column from The New Republic was written by the editors.
A war of ideas is this week a war of images. The abstractions have given way before the concreteness of individual sufferings, which is just as well, since there are no sufferings in the abstract. With the disgusting photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the prison at Abu Ghraib, and then the unbearable video, and the even more unbearable audio, of the butchering of Nicholas Berg, the American public is rudely confronted with the one thing that the Bush administration desperately wanted it not to confront. We now have pictures of what this war has become, raw and repugnant pictures. The responses to these pictures will be visceral, and also contradictory: shame at what these Americans have done, rage at what these terrorists have done. The contradiction is a measure of how much is now being asked of the American viscera.
We hasten to add what would, in calmer times, be perfectly obvious: The atrocity in that room was greater by many factors of immorality than the atrocity in that prison. Indeed, the swift succession of images had the effect, or should have had it, of establishing a sense of proportion about the outrages of the day. The American torture in Abu Ghraib was a violation of American principles, but the jihadist slaughter in the anonymous abattoir was a fulfillment of jihadist principles. It really is as simple as that. Or almost as simple: In our reckoning with what Americans did, we must beware the vanity of repentance. It is not true, as our officials now keep reassuring us, that "we" do not do such things. "We" just did such a thing, which is why our authority as the agents of all good things in Iraq has been calamitously damaged. Our pride in the American system of justice should not become a device for dimming our consciousness of American injustice.
If the Bush administration is now desperate in Iraq, it is not only because events have escaped its control, but also because truth has escaped its control. So many of the Bush administration's prospects for success, and not only in Iraq, have been premised on its manipulation of information. The White House's love of secrecy, its disagreeable mixture of paranoia and hauteur, is well-known; but in the case of the Iraq war, the cognitive autocracy of the administration has gone to strange, and immensely insulting, lengths. It has promoted cognitive dissonance into a domestic strategy. It wants the American people to know that a great enterprise is being conducted far away, but it does not want the American people to know very much about that enterprise.
The refusal of the White House to allow cameras at the arrival of the American war dead, so that the American people could actually have a glimpse of the flag-draped coffins on the bleak tarmac, is typical. When Ted Koppel decides to read the names of the war dead, he is denounced as unpatriotic, though a wiser administration would have agreed to bow its head, too, and join the country in honoring the heroism of those named. But this administration, even when it is right, is not wise. Its sense of its own perfection is incompatible with wisdom. And so no acknowledgment of the dark side of the struggle is made, no sacrifices are asked of the society, no alterations in energy policy or fiscal policy are broached in the name of the emergency. There is no emergency, because such a description of reality does not please Karl Rove. We are supposed to live as if the war that we are supposed to support is not taking place. The teaching of the administration is: The future of America hangs in the balance, so go shopping.
This policy of denial breaks new ground in the history of official cynicism in wartime. The old jingoist hysteria was much better, insofar as it was consistent with the proposition that the war really is a matter of the highest importance. Hysteria is at least a way of showing that you care, antiwar hysteria included. But all these awful pictures have now broken the government's grip on what we know and what we feel. Suddenly the war is not only real, it is also vivid. And this means that suddenly the Bush administration is going to have to argue it all over again, or it will lose the support of a sober and concentrated people.
If, that is, the people decide to be sober and concentrated. We are not, after all, the playthings of our government. They may have asked us to go shopping, but we agreed to go shopping. Do the American people really want to know what the Bush administration does not want it to know? Or is the death of "Friends" and "Frasier" all the death that we wish to contemplate?
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