{news} Fw: The bright, shining lie -- Jonathan Schell Asia Times Online, Hong Kong

[Justine McCabe]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF17Ak01.html
 

Middle East

 Jun 17, 2005

            

The bright, shining lie

By Jonathan Schell

 

Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single news report. Such is the case in regard to the Iraq  war, it seems, with the recent story in the Washington Post by Anthony  Shadid and Steve Fainaru called "Building Iraq's Army: Mission  Improbable". Shadid and Fainaru did something that is rarely done: they  spent several days with a unit of Iraq's new, American-trained forces.  (The typical treatment of the topic consists of a few interviews with  American officers in the Green Zone in Baghdad, leading to some estimation  of how long it will take to complete the job.) The Post story starts with  the lyrics of a song the soldiers of the unit, called Charlie Company,  were singing out of earshot of their American overseers. It was a ballad  to Saddam Hussein, and it ran:

 

We have lived in humiliation since you left

We had hoped to spend our life with you

 

The American media often discuss the political makeup of the insurgency,  but no one until now has suggested that some of the very forces being  trained by the United States might be longing for the return of Saddam. To  the extent that this is the case - or that these forces are otherwise  opposed to the occupation - the United States, far from improving  "security", is now training the future resistance to itself.

 

Indeed, the soldiers of Charlie Company told Shadid and Fainaru that 17 of  them had quit in recent days. They added that every one of them planned to  do the same as soon as possible. Their reasons were simple. They were  bitter at the United States. "Look at the homes of the Iraqis," one  soldier remarked. "The people have been destroyed." When asked by whom, he  answered, "Them" - and pointed to the Americans leading the patrol.

 

The Iraqis had enlisted in the new army only for the salary - US$340 per  month, an enviable sum in today's ruined Iraq. But the money had come at  the price of self-respect. The new recruits had been bought off and hated  themselves for it. One said that after they had all quit, "We'll live by  God, but we'll have our respect."

 

One might wonder whether the reporters had deliberately or unknowingly  picked an exceptionally rebellious unit. But in fact, Charlie Company was  selected by the US Army itself, presumably eager to put its best foot  forward.

 

The American officers' response to their sullen recruits is of a piece  with the entire American effort in Iraq. The officers treat their charges  as if, owing to certain mysterious personal defects, they somehow are not  quite up to the job they have been given.

 

After a typical episode in which the unit was attacked and ran away (four  hailed taxis to make their escape), Sergeant Rick McGovern, who leads the  unit, dressed them down. "You are all cowards," he informed them. He went  on, "My soldiers are over here, away from our families for a year. We are  willing to die for you to have freedom. You should be willing to die for  your own freedom." The tongue-lashing assumed that the Iraqis and the  American shared a cause that, as the story shows, was actually 100%  missing.

 

Iraqi men who hate the American occupation are not cowards if they decline  to shoot other men who are fighting the occupation. On the contrary, the  more courage they had, the less they would engage in such a fight. The men  of Charlie Company do indeed lack courage - courage to turn down the money  they accept for pretending to fight for a cause they despise. Their most  cowardly moment, given their beliefs, was when they sat still while  Sergeant McGovern called them cowards. One soldier, Amar Mana, explained  the situation in the clearest terms: "We don't want to take  responsibility," he said. "The way the situation is, we wouldn't be ready  to take responsibility for a thousand years."

 

And so the Americans and the Iraqis of Charlie Company, like the United  States and Iraq in general today, are led, by choice on the one side and  by bribery and compulsion on the other, to play roles in a script that has  little or nothing to do with the situation they are actually in. In this  situation, it is not necessary to form a whole sentence to tell a lie. Use  of single words or phrases - "Iraqi sovereignty", "freedom", "election",  "security", "democracy", "anti-Iraqi forces", even "courage" and  "cowardice" - involve the speaker in deception, for they are the  constitutive elements of a framework of thought and belief that is itself  

a fabrication.

 

The American occupation of Iraq is something new, but the fundamental  error of the United States has a long pedigree. It is the imprisonment of  the human mind in ideology backed by violence. The classic example is  Joseph Stalin's Russia, under which decades of misrule were rationalized  as a "stage" on the way to the radiant future of true communism. As for  the miserable present, it was amusingly called "actually existing  communism". The future, when it came, of course was not communism at all  but the disintegration of the whole enterprise. All the "stages" turned  out to lead nowhere.

 

Once the mind is in the grip of such a system, every "actually existing"  horror can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful larger picture,  every defeat a stage on the way to the glorious future. The simpler and  more coherent an ideology, the better it can withstand the assault of  fact. So today in Iraq, every act of torture, every flattened city, every  gushing sewer, every car-bombing and beheading, is presented as a bump on  the road to "freedom" for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the  whole world, in which President George W Bush has promised an "end to  tyranny". (It's apparently a rule of ideology that the more sordid the  

reality, the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal must be.)

 

But a moment comes - perhaps it is a sudden defeat, or perhaps it is  merely reading a story like Shadid and Fainaru's - when the fantasy  dissolves, and then one is left face-to-face with the factual truth. All  the "exceptions" turn out to be the rule. When that happens with respect  to Iraq, America's grotesque misadventure there - born of lies, sustained  by lies and productive of more lies every day it continues - will be  brought to a close.

 

Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation  

Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was  

recently published by Nation Books.

 

(Copyright 2005 Jonathan Schell)

 

(Published with permission of Tomdispatch.com/The Nation Magazine) 

            
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