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America's Own Chronicle of Its Hellish Descent
Iraq, Ourselves
By PIERRE TRISTAM
12/16/05 "Counterpunch" -- -- Every week as I prepare to write this
piece I tell myself: Not Iraq, not this time. Almost every week
something makes it impossible to stay away, to get away. Iraq is
6,800 miles from our shores in geography only. What happens there in
any given week has more bearing on what we're becoming here than
anything happening between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains in
any given month. And what we're becoming is a fraud of our former
selves.
The 1970s had "Our Bodies, Ourselves," the Talmud-like treatise on
gender and sexual identity that midwifed feminism's ascent toward
the ankles of America's power structures. This decade has "Iraq,
Ourselves." Less Talmudic, more communal, it's written every day and
-- fittingly for the Internet age of diffusion -- in innumerable
parts by anyone who chooses, and by many who don't, and whose last
words are etched on tombstones in every state.
"Iraq, Ourselves" traces the descent of American values into various
circles of hell. The lust and gluttony for power, the greed for
cheap and easy profit from Iraq's ruins, the wrath of our terrified
military, of our mercenary "private security" goons, and now of
Iraq's government-backed death squads and their hunt for heretics:
All of it combines into a three-ring circus of violence with the
Tigris for a River Styx and the Potomac for a Rubicon. Our imperial
president crossed that one three years ago, with fraud on his lips
and hubris in his plastic laurels.
He, of course, is the head writer of this shameful testament, its
editor-in-chief, though he cannot see past fictions. The White House
has become his very own Eighth Circle where he wallows in the sloth
of flatterers, false prophets, falsifiers, counterfeiters and roving
hypocrites. He plays with them in their little ditches, then rises
every once in a while to spin their tales in front of big audiences
in uniform before sending them off to etch their marble stones while
he retreats back to his circle, unrepentant.
The Bush-Pentagon vast disinformation campaign in Iraq is finally
generating the reaction it ought to have generated back when, in the
earliest days of the war, the Pentagon was spilling Jessica
Lynch-like lies as liberally as it was spilling other people's
blood, staging statue-toppling victory parades in the heart of
Baghdad and manufacturing a "Mission Accomplished" celebration on
the deck of an aircraft carrier. No one should be surprised about
the vast right-wing confabulations that take their source in the
White House's messianic conviction that its little junta should
represent the Middle East's second coming. But the sense of outrage
isn't discouraging still more dangerous fantasies on the part of the
administration's foot soldiers. Television's fair-and-bollix
propagandists, radio's dittoheads, the blogosphere's approximation
of a mobosphere -- they think more disinformation abroad, more
censorship at home, more of the same policies and strategies
everywhere, inc! luding torture and secret prisons, are the answer.
Charles Krauthammer's defense of torture in last week's issue of The
Weekly Standard gave every intellectual sadist and me-generation
jingoist reason to cheer. The argument is too craven to answer. But
Krauthammer throws in a popular myth along the way, that the
Pentagon treats Guantanamo's inmates so well that "our
scrupulousness extends even to providing them with their own Qurans,
which is the only reason alleged abuses of the Quran at Guantanamo
ever became an issue."
"That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name
of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism
is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending
undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners," Krauthammer says.
Never mind the assumption about the Quran's barbarism, which is
demonstrably false, or the more serious guilty-until-proven-innocent
assumption about the detainees, even though not one of them has been
found guilty of anything. There's a more monstrous fallacy here. As
a new book by James Yee, the Army chaplain falsely accused of having
"infiltrated" Guantanamo as an al-Qaida member, makes clear, the
Quran has itself become an instrument of torture. Because of the
petty abuse heaped on the book by their captors (dropping it,
kicking it, mishandling it), Gitmo inmates took to refusing to have
a book in their cell. They weren't allowed to refuse. Those who
still resisted were forced, violently, to accept a book -- a
procedure known as a "forced cell extraction" -- then placed in
isolation until they relented. Their captors, with creative cruelty,
have turned the inmates' one and only haven against them while still
making us believe that "our scrupulousness extends even to p!
roviding them with their own Qurans."
No lie more demonically speaks of the undivine comedy of this whole
war, of the falsehoods corrupting its core assumptions, of the
brutality that shadows America in others' eyes, and not only in
others'. Rot is replacing our ideals from here to Baghdad, to
ourselves.
Pierre Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer and author of
Candide's Notebooks . Reach him at ptristam@att.net.
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