David J. Morris is a former Marine and author of Storm on the Horizon (Free Press, 2004) - this is an account of the Battle of Khafji, January 1991, in the first Gulf War. That book may be for military buffs - it’s about how the marines really get things done. He now teaches out here at University of California, Irvine. He’s good at what he does. In the Winter 2007 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review you’d find his The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground -
Sometimes over there, when I was tired and my mind started drifting, I would find myself on the same tracks as that platoon sergeant, on the same tracks but headed the other direction. Sometimes I found myself thinking that, in its own way, Iraq is a miracle, a miracle of destruction, and that in a disaster of such magnitude there must be some order beneath the chaos, some evidence of God’s handiwork, for surely such a maelstrom could not have been created by man alone. Surely there is a divine energy being worked out in this land, so great is the devastation, so profound is the suffering.
Or maybe this is just the story I’m telling.
Well, he’s done his tours and may go back, even if retired. But then he thinks about things and writes carefully, as in the new issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review with The Image as History: Clint Eastwood’s Unmaking of an American Myth. This is a look at the iconography of the Iraq War in light of recent films on past wars, including Flags of Our Fathers. He’s not you typical Marine -
Americans are perhaps the most individualistic people in the world, and there is little else that really gets us going like a good war, and politicians have known this for a long time. Whenever presidents or other national leaders hope to inspire the public they grasp for the language of war: there’s the LBJ’s War on Poverty, Reagan’s War on Drugs, the War on AIDS, to name only a few. Nevertheless, World War II, or at least the popular Disneyfied version of it that has been propagated by the likes of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Hanks, remains one of the administration’s chief literary tools in its mission to distract us from the fact that Iraq is arguably the most profligate war in American history.
… When I first saw the previews for the film I was disgusted. I had just returned from a reporting tour of Iraq, and the film’s sepulchral images of marines storming the beaches of that godforsaken sulfurous island churned my stomach. Like a lot of former marines, I have a deep-seated suspicion of public flag-waving - I wince when the national anthem is sung at sporting events - and the idea of releasing what looked to be a backslapping-war-is-hell-but-ain’t-it an-exalting-kind-of-hell movie when so many young Americans are losing their lives overseas offended my sense of decorum. Why now? I thought. Such a film might have been appropriate in 2002, but not now. Now it just seemed downright obscene, and I gave even Hollywood enough credit to realize that.
This is a long, specific and careful discussion of how images of war are not only presented, but co-opted for this and that. It’s worth an hour or two of your time.
Morris now writes from time to time for SALON.COM and he’s at it again - thinking about what is really going on, not what we gloss over or what we’re told in brief burst in the media and believe for a moment, until there’s something else that catches our eye - Don Imus or Rosie O’Donnell.
This hit the news earlier, and skipped away, like a flat stone skimmed across a pool - Marines’ Actions in Afghanistan Called Excessive (New York Times, April 14, 2007, but now available only for a fee, as it skipped away). Something on the event is still available at the Kansas City Star, with Marines’ deadly spree broke law -
A U.S. Marine unit broke international humanitarian law by using excessive force in a shooting spree that left 12 people dead, an Afghan human-rights group said Saturday.
The troops fired indiscriminately at pedestrians, people in cars, public buses and taxis in six locations along a 10-mile stretch of road March 4 in Nangarhar province after an explosives-rigged minivan crashed into their convoy, according to the report by Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission.
… “In failing to distinguish between civilians and legitimate military targets the U.S. Marines Corps Special Forces employed indiscriminate force,” the report said. “Their actions thus constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian law standards.”
The Marines pulled the unit. These particular guys are no longer in Afghanistan.
That may not matter much, as Morris now says in America’s Dangerous Trigger Finger, about why the killing of civilians by our Marines in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, “could have profound strategic consequences.” He may be hamming home the obvious, but the detail is telling -
On March 4, a U.S. Marine convoy in the Nangarhar province of eastern Afghanistan was attacked by a suicide bomber driving a minibus, wounding one American. Exactly what happened next remains unclear. According to an investigation by an Afghan human rights group released on April 14, the Marines, who said they came under small-arms fire after the bombing, went on a rampage, shooting at vehicles and pedestrians along 10 miles of road. At least 12 civilians were killed and another 35 were injured, including one infant and three elderly men. A 16-year-old girl, newly married and carrying a bundle of grass to her family’s farmhouse, was shot in the back. A 75-year-old man was shot so many times that his son had trouble recognizing him when he reached the scene.
A few hours after the shootings, the Marines returned to the primary site of the carnage, cordoned it off, and allegedly began removing evidence that it had occurred. Seven journalists representing multiple media outlets complained that the Marines confiscated their equipment and forcibly deleted photographs taken by Afghans working for the Associated Press. According to a protest letter later filed by the AP bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, one Marine raised his fist at the photographers, warning them that he did not want to see any photos of the scene published anywhere. One journalist said he was told, “Delete the photos or we’ll delete you.”
That protest letter isn’t nice, but the Marines knew there was trouble here. There was an initial inquiry what happened. The American military command in Afghanistan found there really was no evidence that the Marines had come under small-arms fire after the bombing. Sow hat do you do? You expel them from the country. “The unit responded to the ambush,” according to a military spokesman, “and the local population perceptions of that response have damaged the relationship between the local population and the Marine special operations company.”
That’s carefully ambiguous. The Marines overreacted, the wrong people died, and there’s a PR problem, so they’re gone now. That was supposed to fix everything.
The problem is the pattern -
We have seen a story like this unfold before in Haditha, Iraq, where Marines stand accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005 after an improvised explosive device killed one Marine. While there is no direct connection between Haditha and Nangarhar, the incidents are troublingly similar: an insurgent attack followed by a gross overreaction by American forces (specifically Marine units), a bumbling cover-up, and an eventual investigation by American military authorities - one that seldom if ever holds anyone genuinely accountable above the level of foot soldier.
The SALON coverage of Haditha is here, and it was discussed on this site in The Press Conference From Another Planet (March 29, 2006) and Thought Experiment (April 16, 2006) and Notes on the New America (May 21, 2006) and, from June 11, 2006, The Dog That Didn’t Bark, Assessments, Responsibility and Changing the Subject. Nangarhar is new, or part of a pattern.
Such events are not simple, but they are dangerous -
As with so many issues in war, the closer you look into a situation, the harder it can be to judge. As a former Marine officer, my first impulse is, somewhat predictably, to sympathize with the troops. Judgments come easy when you’re sitting in the comfort of your living room, but when you are taking fire from seemingly every direction, the finely wrought laws of war start to seem like the dreams of a war college professor. I’ve interviewed hundreds of soldiers and Marines who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and I’m repeatedly struck by the weighty, almost metaphysical, overtones of modern combat, in which soldiers have a half second to make the right decision and many years to live with the results of making the wrong one. (And those are only the scenarios, of course, in which the soldiers live to tell the tale.)
But one of the great tragedies of incidents like Haditha and Nangarhar is that no matter how they are adjudicated by the Pentagon, they are resounding defeats in a global conflict whose battlefield is ever media-oriented. They draw dark comparisons in the U.S. media with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, provide fodder for anti-U.S. sympathizers elsewhere, and fit conveniently into the larger meta-narrative of quagmire and American perfidy overseas.
It’s tough for the Marines - incredibly so - and incidents like these are just destroying us -
As Abu Ghraib demonstrated so starkly, American military atrocities are more than localized moral failures: They are events with deep and troubling strategic implications. They help perpetuate the image of the American war on terror as a genocidal crusade against Muslims, providing insurgent Web site operators with ammunition in the ongoing propaganda war against the United States and its allies. They undermine the international credibility of the U.S. military, making it that much harder to attract allies to work alongside American forces. And they destroy any hard-won trust of U.S. troops among civilian populations: More than the actual, complicated facts behind the killing of civilians, it is frequently the perception of the locals that matters most.
And of course things are getting a bit worse - Nangarhar and Haditha - the war in Afghanistan has changed. It is much like Iraq now -
Since 2005, Taliban attacks have grown more savage and suicidal, and they have targeted the civilian populace. The United States has responded by ratcheting up offensive operations, including those in the provinces bordering Pakistan where Osama bin Laden is rumored to be holed up. Every year since 2002 has been deadlier than the last in terms of conflict-related casualties. President Bush just pledged another $10 billion to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan. But the Taliban has vowed a spring offensive, and as one recent Salon report showed, there is not enough military manpower to stabilize the country.
And Morris notes the “some” of our troops - like the Marine unit in question - “may not be adequately prepared for the challenges of a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which depends on winning the trust and loyalty of the local populace.”
We’re not, however, talking about learning Arabic, the local customs, and smiling -
Part of the problem no doubt is the scarifying institutional experience of the Marine Corps, the military branch that prides itself on its singular ferocity in battle, and which of late has been almost exclusively focused on conducting high-intensity combat operations in the restive Anbar province of Iraq. (Over the course of the Iraq war, casualty rates in Marine units have run roughly twice that of comparable U.S. Army units.) In this respect, I found the general mindset telling when I embedded with Marines who were training Iraqi security forces in Anbar in 2006. “The reason I joined the Marine Corps was to get into gunfights,” one Marine stationed near Fallujah told me. “I hate all this nation-building bullshit.”
Morris connects the dots - the Marines implicated, and now charged, in the Haditha “atrocity” had fought in the battle of Fallujah in November 2004. Morris notes that another Marine, stationed near Ramadi in 2006, said to him - “The last time we were here, we were shooting everyone in every building we entered. And now they want us to pass out candy and soccer balls?”
It may be a cultural thing. The Marines implicated in the Nangarhar incident had already served in Iraq, and the unit was “an elite special operations platoon that accepted only highly experienced Marines” - most of its members had done multiple tours in Iraq. And this raises a question - “Can a veteran of intense combat forget everything he has learned and participate in operations requiring ’softer’ tactics and a lower threshold of violence?”
That’s a good question. Even if you don’t like your orders, you follow them and do your duty, even if grudgingly. But if your heart isn’t in it?
And there’s a twist. The Marines aren’t like the Army at all -
The Army, by contrast, has been dealing with a larger spectrum of operational environments and has had the luxury of developing what is, in many cases, a more nuanced counterinsurgency approach than the Marine Corps. The softer Army approach is best exemplified by the rise in Baghdad of the so-called Petraeus boys (in reference to the current U.S. general in Iraq, David Petraeus), including military commanders David Kilkullen, H.R. McMaster and John Nagl, who speak of counterinsurgency as “a thinking man’s game” and focus on efforts to secure the safety and support of the local population. In 2006, I saw the disparity and resentment between the Army and Marines on display in Ramadi, a town overseen by an Army command, but under which many Marine units serve. One particularly outspoken Army captain declared his open distrust of Marines, calling them “the butchers of Haditha.”
This is getting complicated. Do we pull the Marines? We’re short on troops, but you have to assign tasks by competencies - skill sets, as they say these days. Can the Marines be transformed quickly? There’s a lot o tradition there. It does look good. And there’s history to contend with -
Obviously, the innocent victims of these sorts of atrocities deserve our best sympathies, but whenever I speak with Americans about Iraq and Afghanistan, and everything we’re doing wrong there, I also feel compelled to remind them that our troops are among the most disciplined and restrained that the world has ever seen. The American occupations in those countries are regularly compared to the French counterinsurgent campaign in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. It is worth remembering that France - a country that never went through a period of self-examination as the United States did after Vietnam -operated concentration camps for the most of the conflict, torturing and summarily executing hundreds of Algerian citizens that it found undesirable. American troops have committed some exceedingly bad errors of judgment in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them approach what can be considered the historical norm for counterinsurgent wars.
So our guys are among the most disciplined and restrained troops the world has ever seen, really, while at the same time Human Rights Watch notes the Taliban killed seven hundred civilians last year - “The insurgents are increasingly committing war crimes, often by directly targeting civilians.” But we catch the crap -
… an incident like Nangarhar causes outsized collateral damage, allowing for emphasis on the theme of American military power misapplied. On the whole, our sins in Iraq and Afghanistan have mostly been sins of ignorance and negligence rather than malice. The difference is that today’s media-saturated world makes it nearly impossible to hide incidents in which the troops screw up badly.
And Morris also reports when he talks to our guys about all this “there is a sense of rank unfairness about the military justice system.” To them it seems “it is always lower-ranking enlisted men and most often infantrymen who stand accused.” Pilots, artillerymen and officers above the rank of captain - they’re never charged with war crimes, much less “the civilian leaders at the Pentagon, elected officials or members of the foreign policy establishment who advocated the wars in the first place.” Shit runs downhill, as they say in the military. The commander and senior enlisted man of the Marine unit at Nangarhar were relieved of their command positions, oddly enough - but, as of yet, no charges have been filed against them. Just like Haditha and Abu Ghraib.
Morris, the retired Marine, is perplexed. This cannot stand -
Our troops in the field have to be held to a standard of conduct, even if the enemy is not, and even if the military justice system has historically been stacked against them. Just because they might feel under siege does not relieve them of the responsibility to act morally and follow the rules of engagement. Nor are their leaders relieved of command responsibility if their troops in the field fail to do so. Failure at either level is not only immoral but counterproductive, and with enough repetition, could ultimately help lose the wars.
Something must be done. What must be done won’t be done.
And in an oddly matching item, Sidney Blumenthal explains why - “To understand how Bush justifies a torture policy that is the bane of our nation, consider the sentimental cowboy art that decks his Oval Office walls.”
What? Actually the item is quite telling, and curiously, parts of this article will be published in different form by the Nexus Institute of Amsterdam, which held a conference on kitsch that Blumenthal attended in November 2006. A conference on kitsch? There are such things? And who knew it was a problem? Kitsch - something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality - matters? Who knew?
Blumenthal opens by touting his new film -
Having written extensively on the Bush administration’s torture policy for Salon, I concluded, in light of the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib, that the visual medium is the most powerful and penetrating way to communicate the policy. More than two years ago, I brought the idea of making a documentary on the Bush policy to Alex Gibney, the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Alex shared my sense of urgency, and Taxi to the Dark Side will premiere April 27 at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Alex is the director; I am executive producer.)
Through the film runs the story of an Afghan taxi driver, known only as Dilawar, completely innocent of any ties to terrorism, who was tortured to death by interrogators in the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. “Taxi to the Dark Side” traces the evolution of the Bush policy from Bagram (Dilawar’s interrogators speak in the film) to Guantánamo (we filmed the official happy tour) to Abu Ghraib; its roots in sensory deprivation experiments decades ago that guided the CIA in understanding torture; the opposition within the administration from the military and other significant figures (the former general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, explain how that internal debate went, while John Yoo, one of its architects, defends it); the congressional battle to restore the standard of the Geneva Convention that forbids torture (centered on John McCain’s tragic compromise); and the sudden popularity of the Fox TV show “24″ in translating torture into entertainment by means of repetitious formulations of the bogus ticking-time-bomb scenario.
Yet “Taxi to the Dark Side” is more than an exposé of policy. Its irrefutable images are the counterpoint to the peculiar aesthetics propagated in the age of George W. Bush, in which, through the contradictory styles of softening nostalgia and hardening cruelty, the president and his followers seek to justify their actions not only to the public but also to themselves.
Okay, then, is there an aesthetic that informs the Bush presidency? Can you claim that?
[This] would seem to be an unfair and artificial imposition on a man who prizes his intuition (”I’m a gut player”) and openly derides complication (”I don’t do nuance”) - that is, if Bush himself did not insist on the connection. Indeed, he appears on the official White House Web site, conducting a tour of the art and artifacts he has chosen to decorate the Oval Office, assuming the duty of docent himself. He holds forth on the large windows and the rug with rays of the sun emanating from the seal of the president and the provenance of his desk before getting to the artwork. (On April 19, Bush recounted to a crowd in Tipp City, Ohio, a story he has told many times, of how he commissioned his wife, Laura, to design the rug and then in defense of his Iraq policy simply remarked, “Remember the rug?”)
So the man likes art. He like his portraits - Abraham Lincoln (”The job of the president is to set big goals for the country”) and George Washington (”You couldn’t have the Oval Office without George Washington on the wall”). And he likes sculpture, the bsuts in his office - Lincoln (”You can tell he’s one of my favorites”), Dwight Eisenhower (”steady”) and Winston Churchill (”gift of the British prime minister … Churchill was a war leader … resolute, tough”).
Who knew? But he really likes the two Texas painting he added to the White House - “The Texas paintings are on the wall because that’s where I’m from and where I’m going.”
There’s the problem -
One of them, by little-known painter and illustrator William Henry Dethlef Koerner, titled “A Charge to Keep,” depicts a hatless cowboy followed by two other riders galloping up a hill. Their faces are intent as they pursue some quarry in the distance that cannot be seen by others. Or are they being chased? “I love it,” Bush said, further explaining his intimate feeling for the painting to reporters and editors of the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper. He offered his interpretation: “He’s a determined horseman, a very difficult trail. And you know at least two people are following him, and maybe a thousand.” Bush added that the painting is “based” on an old hymn. “And the hymn talks about serving the Almighty. So it speaks to me personally.” When he was governor of Texas and the painting hung in his office, Bush wrote a note of explanation to his staff: “This is us.”
It is? Koerner, we learn, studied at the Howard Pyle School of Art, then became a regular illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post, “a mass magazine that appealed to small-town sentimentality and mythology in an age before the spread of radio.” In 1912, it gave Koerner the choice assignment of illustrating Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage.” Ah.
There’s a back story there - the minister who gave the painting to Bush - but it comes down to this -
The idea of Bush as a Christian cowboy, dashing upward and onward to fulfill the Lord’s commandments, inspired him to title his campaign autobiography (written by his then communications advisor, Karen Hughes) “A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House.” Sample: “I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans.”
Tell it to the Marines.
And of course the other paint is an Alamo thing - by regional Texan artist Julian Onderdonk -
The painting features indistinct Mexican women making tortillas in the plaza of the mission that the Mexican army besieged in the Texas war of independence of 1836. Nearly every man was killed, a massacre that became symbolic of a heroic last stand and a rallying cry for revenge. As everyone knows who has ever read one of the many histories or novels about the conflict or seen the TV series of the 1950s, “Davy Crockett,” or any of the movies titled “The Alamo,” such as the one featuring John Wayne as Davy Crockett, the ragtag defenders knew they were doomed but decided to fight the overwhelming Mexican army. In an incident that may be apocryphal, the commander, William Travis, drew a line in the ground, urging those who wished to leave to cross it; none did. Thus dying for the cause became the red badge of courage. Dying was “never dying,” as the old hymn said, but gave birth to the republic of Texas.
The upshot -
Studying the racing cowboy, Bush gleans a moral lesson to stay the course, even if its end cannot be seen; his certainty that he is followed, not just by two men but also by “thousands”; and his conviction that his hot pursuit is divinely guided. As he gazes at the Alamo he is reminded that doubt and skepticism are equivalent to cowardice and capitulation, that battling to the end will lead to redemption and resurrection.
Okay, that may be a stretch - but it may not be. And of course he has more kitsch - Saddam Hussein’s pistol -
The president has had the gun mounted like a trophy. “He really liked showing it off,” a visitor told Time magazine. In his fortress of solitude, surrounded by images of the rider and the Alamo, the determined pursuer and the last stand, the gun has become a token of Bush’s inevitable victory.
Blumenthal is clearly trying to scare us.
And he notes Bush like to watch “24.” - the Fox show that glorifies torture. And it’s not just him -
An obsession with torture has not been restricted to the White House. It has spread into the larger culture, especially through a popular TV series, on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox entertainment channel, called “24.” Every week, a fictional hero named Jack Bauer, an agent for a fictional government Counter Terrorist Unit, races the clock, in fantastic ticking-time-bomb scenarios, to thwart terrorist plots. Bauer’s favored method is torture. Agent Bauer has shot one suspect’s wife, staged a fake execution of another’s child, electrocuted another bad guy and even tortured his own brother. Bauer is also tortured from time to time, fostering an impulse for vengeance. From 2002 through 2005, the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group, counted 67 torture scenes on “24.”
In March 2006, in Washington, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, sponsored a panel discussion devoted to “24,” titled “America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?” Lending verisimilitude to the celebration of the fictional TV series, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was the first speaker. “Frankly,” he said about the program, “it reflects real life.” He expressed a wish that terror investigations could be more like those on TV. “I wish we could have a rapid execution of tasks within 24 hours,” Chertoff said. Howard Gordon, the show’s executive producer, conceded, “When Jack Bauer tortures, it’s in a compressed reality.”
The moderator, right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, boasted, “Everybody I’ve met in the government that I tell I watch this show, they are huge fans. Vice president’s a huge fan. Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld is a huge fan.” In fact, on the same day as the Heritage Foundation event the producer and director of “24″ were feted at a private lunch at the White House. Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported: “Among the attendees were Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff; Tony Snow, the White House spokesman; Mary Cheney, the Vice-President’s daughter; and Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President’s wife, who, [Joel] Surnow [the show's director] said, is ‘an extreme ‘24′ fan.’”
Well, there’s is no accounting for people’s taste. De gustibus non est disputandum. Too bad it’s policy -
John Yoo, in his book justifying torture, “War by Other Means,” published in 2006, even cited “24″ as a legitimate intellectual proof for the policy he helped put into place: “What if, as the popular Fox television program ‘24′ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?” he writes about the most grandiose of ticking-time-bomb plots. This sort of scenario invariably prompts agent Bauer’s remorseless threat to terrorist suspects: “You are going to tell me what I want to know. It’s just a question of how much you want it to hurt.” Thus the lines between fact and fiction, reality and kitsch, and policy and entertainment are blurred.
We’re in trouble. This isn’t Reagan’s Remington’s -
Koerner’s Western pictures depict an idealized past, where never is heard a discouraging word. At the Saturday Evening Post, he joined with Norman Rockwell to create the brush strokes of a warming nostalgia.
These enduring images infused Reaganism with its emotional culture. Ronald Reagan, after all, had been raised at the turn of the century in small-town Illinois and became a contract player in Hollywood’s dream factory. Communicating kitsch was second nature to him. The perfect representation came in the TV commercial for his reelection campaign in 1984. As an American flag was raised in a small town, the voice-over intoned: “It’s morning again in America.” The past was present and all was right with the world.
Now, kitsch has been radically remade. No longer evoking nostalgic utopianism, kitsch releases the compulsions of fear. Under Bush, kitsch has been transformed from sentimentality into sadomasochism.
There’s a reason the retired Marine down at UC Irvine was writing about iconography and war movies and Clint Eastwood and all that. Somehow it all fits together. As they say, tell it to the Marines.
